There was a time when American politicians feared the discovery of a mistress or an unpaid tax bill. Back then, a career could perish over a single indiscretion or a resurfaced photo from college. The political graveyards of days of yore, then, were full of men whose offenses, by the standards of 2026, might barely qualify for an embarrassing Tuesday.
Now, with the November midterms approaching, voters face a collection of candidates whose biographies might once have been rejected by the writers of a particularly implausible political satire. Something has happened to the American sense of the disqualifying. Today, scandal, once a mortal wound, can actually become a credential of defiance and ignorance can be marketed as authenticity.
The bizarre offers its own peculiar form of political capital, especially when notoriety guarantees an audience and an audience can be converted into votes. The result is a political culture in which the boundaries of acceptable conduct are being renegotiated in public, often by the people most eager to cross them. At the risk of getting too nostalgic for an imagined golden age of American statesmanship, here’s a nice dose of reality: the republic has survived demagogues, charlatans, segregationists and an assorted variety of crooks.
Political parties have always tolerated questionable characters when electoral advantage demanded it, and we’ve all survived those. Still, the 2026 midterms offer a remarkable assortment of political controversies, cutting across party lines and levels of government. We’ve got a Republican who made Nazi jokes; a Democrat who drank before a candidate forum; a congressman pardoned by a president from the opposing party.
Each illuminates a different corner of America's changing political culture. Together, they raise a question that might once have been answered long before Election Day. What, exactly, does a candidate have to do to become unelectable?
Brandon Herrera has built an enormous online following with firearms videos and provocations that might once have destroyed a congressional campaign. Known as The AK Guy, the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District has faced scrutiny over videos featuring Nazi imagery, including a reenactment of Hitler's suicide, and derogatory remarks about women. Herrera rejects suggestions of Nazi sympathies, describing his material as irreverent entertainment.
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