The Werewolf Was the Good One

The Republican Party has a candidate problem this fall, and it is not the one it talks about. The party says the problem is the economy, or the war, or turnout, or the President's numbers. Those are real. But in three of the Senate races that will decide who runs the chamber in January, the Republican on the ballot is the problem, and in each case the party picked him or kept her anyway. Here are the receipts, from the least bad to the worst.

Start in Texas, where this paper was on Tuesday. Ken Paxton is the Attorney General of Texas, an impeached one, and his campaign answered a Democrat's flu by demanding "proof of life," opening a "Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line," and watching its allies spread a story that James Talarico had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital in Ohio. The hospital said he had never been treated there. Talarico said he had never been to Ohio. Paxton has accepted none of the four debates Talarico has accepted. His office's plea offer to a man charged with continuously sexually abusing a young boy was one day, and Paxton defends it by citing a sixty-day sentence his office did not ask for, which the man did not serve. No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994. Marist has Talarico ahead 50 to 44, and the Times and Siena have him ahead 51 to 45. That is what this nominee has done with the reddest big state in the country.

Then Maine. Susan Collins is not a crank, and the paper will not pretend she is. She is a five-term senator who knows the appropriations code better than almost anyone alive. Her opponent, Troy Jackson, is a logger from Allagash and a former president of the Maine Senate, and he is not polished. At their third debate on Tuesday he mixed up Medicaid and Medicare and she corrected him on stage. Polished candidates do not do that. And he is leading her anyway: 51 to 47 in Marist's poll this month, 50 to 46 in the Washington Post's, a tie in CBS's. He is leading because he has found the one sentence about her that sticks: "100 percent of the time, when Donald Trump needs her, Susan Collins is going to be there."

Here is what that sentence means, using her own votes. In January of last year she voted against Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. He was confirmed 51 to 50, with the Vice President breaking the tie. Her no was on the record and he was in the job. In June she voted to open debate on the President's tax and spending bill, a 51-to-49 vote that she could have stopped. Days later she voted against the final bill, and it passed 51 to 50, again with the Vice President breaking the tie. Her no was on the record and the bill was law. Asked on Tuesday for a vote against the President that had changed an outcome, she named Hegseth, the one that did not. Fairness requires the rest. The Bangor Daily News counted four times since January 2025 that she has broken with her party on a vote that was actually decisive, and in 2020 she did not lead in a single public poll and won by nearly nine points. She may do it again. But four decisive breaks in twenty-one months is the whole of the independence, and Maine Democrats count nineteen deciding votes for the President's nominees. A senator whose no counts only when it does not matter is not an independent. She is a weather vane with a seniority clause.

Now Georgia, which is where the party's candidate problem stops being a problem and becomes a portrait. The Republican nominee is Representative Mike Collins, and on Tuesday night, at the Atlanta Press Club's last debate before November 3, Senator Jon Ossoff took him apart.

Begin with the family, because Collins's campaign does. His daughter Summer is married to David Alan Scheer II, a far-right influencer who appears in family photographs on Collins's campaign website. In July CNN's KFile reported on Scheer's posts. He told a commenter that "there's nothing wrong with White Nationalism." In a November video he spoke of "sixty million Christians that were killed by Jewish Bolsheviks." On a podcast he warned that White people were being driven toward extinction, and, as reported, that only "clearing our land of other people" would save them. He asked his Telegram followers to vote on whether he should make a video about "why Gen-Z doesn't hate Hitler," and later deleted it. According to voter and property records, he has been registered since September 2024 at a house on land Collins owns, next door to Collins's own. Scheer has said in a video that he did not buy the land and that the family was gracious enough to let them stay. So the content is being made on the candidate's property, by his son-in-law, and the candidate knows it.

Ossoff's question on Tuesday was simple. Would Collins commit, for the rest of the campaign, to stop neo-Nazi content from being produced at his home? Ossoff put it this way: "Imagine running for Senate while neo-Nazi propaganda is disseminated to an audience of millions from your home." Asked by the moderator what he had said to his daughter and son-in-law about the posts, Collins said, "That's my family." Then he talked about a man who had been jailed for threatening to kill him and his son-in-law, which is a real crime and a real threat and is not an answer. Eventually he said, "It's wrong. We have no place for that." He did not say he would ask Scheer to stop, and he did not say Scheer would have to leave.

It is not only the family. In January the House ethics watchdog found substantial reason to believe Collins's chief of staff, Brandon Phillips, had put his girlfriend on the office payroll as an intern who did not do commensurate work. Phillips now works on the Senate campaign, and Collins and Phillips deny wrongdoing. The next chief of staff left under scrutiny too, and Collins is on his third in a year. In August the Washington Post reported that a former Collins staffer had posted a swastika and a picture of himself in Ku Klux Klan robes on X. And the week before the debate, the Daily Beast reported that two of the campaign's county "convoy captains," Joshua Mote in Hall County and Michael Boggus in Banks County, had been vice president and state director of American Patriots USA, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a white nationalist hate group. Its founder, Chester Doles, is a former Klan leader who went to prison for beating a Black man in 1993. The campaign said it did not know. In 2019 Collins himself called American Patriots USA a "hate organization." So he knew what the group was. He just did not know who was running his convoys. Ossoff's summary on Tuesday was that Collins had "hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office." That is a debate line, and the paper would not put it in its own voice. But the paper notes that the line has more footnotes than most debate lines get.

Then Collins tried to change the subject to Jeffrey Epstein, and that was the night's real mistake. He went after Ossoff for taking money from Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, whose name turned up in the Justice Department's Epstein files. Hoffman gave Ossoff's campaign the legal maximum of $7,000. Hoffman has admitted meeting Epstein several times, says the contact came through fundraising for MIT, and has apologized for what he called "my personal misjudgment." That is a fair thing to ask about. But Hoffman is also the man who, when the President was refusing to release the files last November, posted that "Trump should release all of the Epstein files: every person and every document in the files." The President's answer at the time was "I don't care about it, released or not," and a demand that the Justice Department investigate Hoffman.

Mike Collins's record on the files runs the other way. In July of last year he voted against a Democratic measure to force the Justice Department to release them. On November 16 the President reversed himself and told House Republicans to vote for release, and two days later Collins voted yes, with all but one member of the House. So when Collins asked Ossoff to answer for Hoffman, Ossoff's first words were the question every Republican consultant in the country should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids: "Mike, who on your team advised you to raise the Epstein files?" Then he answered it for him. "You voted to cover up the evidence, Mike." He reminded the room that when Collins cast that vote, he "knew 14-year-old girls had been raped," and he said Collins did it "because Donald Trump told you to." Collins's comeback was that Ossoff "never answered the question," and that "I voted to release those files." He did, once he had permission. Nobody ever said who on his team thought Epstein was a good topic for Mike Collins. The paper would like to know too.

The paper will add the part neither man had time for. The law Collins voted for, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, gave the Justice Department until December 19 to release the files. It missed the deadline. In January it announced about 3.5 million pages and declared itself in compliance, while withholding records as duplicates, as privileged, and under the law's own exceptions. A federal court has since rejected the duplicate excuse for handwritten FBI notes and ordered a judge to review them privately, and the department is appealing. The department's own inspector general has opened a review of how it identifies, redacts and releases the records. Yesterday seventeen state attorneys general asked Congress for a second transparency act, because the first one is not being obeyed. The President told Republicans to vote for release, and they did, and his Justice Department has spent ten months releasing on its own terms. Collins voted for a law and then watched his own party's administration ignore it, and the subject he chose to bring up on a debate stage was a Democratic donor.

The polls have him behind. YouGov in September had Ossoff ahead 51 to 41 among registered voters, and closer to five among the likeliest ones. That is a long way down from 2022, and that is the comparison the paper wants Georgia Republicans to sit with.

In 2022 the party nominated Herschel Walker for this same kind of seat. Two women said Walker had paid for their abortions, which he denied, while he ran as an opponent of abortion without exceptions. And on November 16, 2022, at a runoff rally in McDonough, he told the crowd about a vampire movie he had watched the night before, "Fright Night, Freak Night or some type of night," and that he had learned a werewolf can kill a vampire. "I don't want to be a vampire anymore," he said. "I want to be a werewolf." The vampire, it emerged, was Raphael Warnock. When the clip went everywhere, Walker went on Fox News to say his werewolf story had a deeper meaning. He lost the runoff 51.4 to 48.6. Republicans have spent four years treating Walker as the floor, the candidate you get when the party lets celebrity beat judgment. Mike Collins is polling below him. Walker wanted to be a werewolf. He did not have a son-in-law next door taking a poll about Hitler, or a convoy captain from a Klan founder's group, or a vote against the Epstein files. By the standard Georgia Republicans have set this year, the werewolf was the good one.

Now the warning, and the paper means it as a warning. Every one of these people can still win. In December 2017 Alabama held a special election for the Senate, and the Republican was Roy Moore, a former chief justice of the state's supreme court. Leigh Corfman said that when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two, he initiated sexual contact with her. Other women described him pursuing them as teenagers. Moore denied all of it. The President endorsed him and campaigned for him across the state line in Pensacola. Alabama had voted for the President by twenty-eight points the year before. Moore lost by about 22,000 votes, a point and a half. A man accused of preying on a fourteen-year-old came within a point and a half of the United States Senate.

That is the floor under all three of this year's candidates. Paxton has been impeached, his campaign invented a psychiatric hospital stay, and he trails in every recent public poll the paper has seen, and he can still win Texas. Susan Collins has been behind before and won by nine. Mike Collins has a son-in-law making white-nationalist videos on his land and a debate he lost on Tuesday, and he can still win Georgia, because a party that came within a point and a half with Roy Moore does not believe anything disqualifies a candidate. The receipts above are not a prediction. They are what the voters should have in hand before they decide, because the party already decided it did not care.

One note on the clown at the top of this page, since readers will ask why it is Susan Collins and not either of the men. The answer is that a face on this paper is earned over time, and only one of the three has put in the time. Paxton and Mike Collins are the kind of nominee a party runs once and spends the next cycle explaining, and the paper does not expect either of them to be around long enough to justify the paint. Susan Collins has been in the Senate since 1997. She has spent most of the last two years voting with the President almost every time her vote decides the matter, and against him mostly when it does not, and Maine has kept sending her back anyway, five times. A clown who wanders onto the stage once is a sideshow. The one who has kept the act going for thirty years, and is asking for a sixth term to keep it going longer, is the headliner. Five clowns. The election is November 3.