Arthur Jones, a Republican candidate for Congress from Chicago. Image by YouTube

By Ari Feldman December 3, 2019

Arthur Jones, an avowed anti-Semite and the former leader of the American Nazi Party, is running for Congress as a Republican in an Illinois district — again.

In 2018, Jones won the Republican primary for Illinois’s heavily Democratic third district, which covers southwestern suburbs of Chicago, after no other candidates ran against him. In the general election, despite his views being widely reported on in the district, he received roughly a quarter of the vote, or about 56,000 individual votes.

This time around, however, he has competition for the Republican nomination, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Mike Fricilone, a member of a local county’s Republican party board, announced his bid earlier this year, while Catherine O’Shea, a real estate broker, announced her run on Monday, the last day to file to enter the primary. Fricilone told the Sun-Times that he got in the race “to have a credible candidate” from the Republican party.

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In a statement to the Sun-Times, the Illinois Republican Party chairman Tim Schneider said that the party “vehemently condemns Arthur Jones’ candidacy. His racism and bigotry have no place in our party or American politics. As we did in 2016 and 2018, we will oppose his candidacy in every way possible.”

Last year, despite not entering a candidate to run against Jones, the Republican party also denounced his candidacy, saying they were weighing options including supporting an independent candidate or organizing a write-in campaign for the general election. According to Ballotpedia, there were no independent candidates in the 2018 election, and write-in candidates received about 2,400 votes of 223,000 votes cast.

This is Jones’ ninth time running for the third district’s congressional seat, according to the Sun-Times.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman

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