On Election Day last week, white nationalist Nick Fuentes urged his supporters on X to “get out and vote Democrat today.” The post racked up over 12 million views. Hours later, in the wake of the Democratic sweep, Fuentes took credit for the victory. “We did it again” he wrote on Telegram, later calling the phenomenon “the Groyper Effect,” a reference to the nickname given to his followers.
In recent days, Fuentes has claimed the election results are an opportunity for him and his allies on the far right.
“Let the Democrats rule; see how that goes,” Fuentes said during a livestream last week. “There will come a time when the far left will terrorize people, and they’re going to push all of them into the arms of the right. Who’s going to fight the far left? Only the far right. This is why we have to take over the right wing now.”
In another livestream last week, Fuentes added a warning to the GOP leadership: “It’s our party now … You need to cooperate with us… Groypers are open for business. It has [to] be America First—and if it’s not, we’ll do it again for the enemy.”
A WIRED review of comments from white-supremacist, Christian-nationalist, and other far-right groups in the wake of the midterm results shows much of the same. While the groups are uniformly attacking Donald Trump’s failure to prioritize white, Christian, American values, they also believe that this sudden shift to the left will result in a backlash that will see more people embrace far-right groups and ideologies.
“Many prominent figures in racist, extremist movements have taken to declaring the MAGA movement dead since the midterm elections, claiming that the results validate their previous criticisms of the Trump administration and opens new opportunities for their movements to push disaffected voters toward their ideological beliefs,” Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, tells WIRED.
While some of the Republican party’s extremist candidates were rejected during the elections last week, many did win their elections.
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights tracked 535 candidates running in statewide races who were members of at least one far-right Facebook group. The researchers found that of the 476 races that had been called by last Friday, 338 of those candidates were victorious, representing a 71 percent win rate. (The vast majority of these races saw GOP incumbents retain their seats.) In Florida, for example, 34-year-old citrus farmer Marshall Rawson, who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, easily defeated his Democrat opponent in the state’s 10th District State House race.