More Than 56,000 Vote For Nazi Leader In Illinois Congressional Race
Arthur Jones, a Republican candidate for Congress from Chicago. Image by YouTube
By Aiden Pink November 9, 2018
Neo-Nazi Arthur Jones lost his longshot bid for an Illinois congressional seat on Tuesday. But he still received more than 56,000 votes.
Jones, a former American Nazi Party leader, ran as a Republican candidate in the heavily-Democratic Third District outside Chicago. He was able to make the ballot because he was the only person to run in the Republican primary. He was condemned by the state Republican Party and the Republican Jewish Coalition, but they were unable to remove him from the ballot.
With more than 97% of precincts reporting at midnight early Wednesday, Jones was losing to incumbent Rep. Dan Lipinski 73.5%-26.5% — but that still meant that Jones received more than 56,000 votes, even after months of coverage in local media about his hateful views.
Jones’s campaign website includes a section called “Holocaust?” in which he calls the genocide of six million Jews “the biggest blackest lie in history.” He told the Chicago Tribune that Jews who were held in concentration camps did not die in gas chambers. He also attempted to appeal to the Arab-American vote by posting an advertisement in a community paper promising to oppose all aid to Israel.
Jones now leads a group called the America First Committee, which according to the Anti-Defamation League is affiliated with a white supremacist organization.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
