Honestly, anything a voter has to work to find out.
> On my side of the argument, there is the almost unbroken record of moderate/liberal Democrats defeating progressives in primaries, and the recall of leftist politicians in (of all places) San Francisco.
Then they should attack those ideas in their ads, in their stump speeches, and write lots of strident op-eds about them.
> ...and the recall of leftist politicians in (of all places) San Francisco.
> The party rejects this stuff, because ordinary voters reject it...
IIRC, that recall was led by people from outside the normal party structure.
Then they've decided to suffer an account of what those "weirdos on Twitter and in elite college administrations" say, and I guess that's their call. People can be forgiven for assuming what the "party" thinks is what their coalition members are loudly saying.
I'm not so sure about that. If they weren't, wouldn't be easier to throw them under the bus than it seems to be?
In the most literal sense: I have no dog in this fight. But I don't think there is anything funny at all about having a major political party with Nazi's in it. We have a couple of those clowns here in NL in politics as well and fortunately for now the mainstream parties are staying well clear of that. But there may come a day that they will embrace it and then - as far as I'm concerned - all bets are off because it means that the mainstream and the fringe no longer care about being seen together. Note that the actual Nazi's came to power on somewhere between 10 and 15% of the electorate. You may be a lot closer to that than you think.
But what happened is subtle. It's not that GOP voters in the Illinois 3rd are sympathetic to Nazis. It's that a stray dog wearing a Democratic party sweater would have a better chance of being elected in that district than a Republican, so no serious Republican will run for the seat (when you run in a district, lose, and then try to run somewhere else, you're tarred as a carpetbagger). So the only people that run for these ultra-safe seats are lunatics.
But most people don't actually know that! You have to be a political nerd to follow stuff like this. To normal people, the specifics of a congressional candidate are as opaque as the Cubs starting shortstop is to me (is shortstop a thing? is that one of those differences between the NL and the AL?). You take my point.
So really, they're just voting for the party, and not for the candidate, and this particular Nazi took advantage of it.
That is why we have what's called a 'cordon sanitaire' around the parties that are enablers of Nazism, the one thing that sets the US apart from NL right now is that we still have the luxury of doing so. But the moment VVD/CDA/SP/D66/GL would accept one of the fringe that difference would be erased. Now the jerks have to first find a way into a mainstream party that will not kick them out or (alternatively) find a way to 51% of the vote (highly unlikely, for now, though things are very dynamic and it could well change to that at some point).
This is a pretty scary development, in ordinary times people would be expected to protest against a party that allowed Nazis to run under their banner by punishing them elsewhere, you'd expect that enough swing voters would see this as distasteful enough to guarantee that a party that had a single Nazi on their roster could not be expected to win the house/senate/presidential elections. But that's not the case any more (if it ever was). This normalized 'Nazi's in the house' for parties that may well end up in government. And that should have never ever happened.
His nomination in 2018 was a fluke: he ran unopposed (it was a Democratic wave year election --- the Trump midterms, where we flipped the House†, and no Republican wanted to stake any of their time or reputation on a suicide mission to try to flip a safe blue seat). The IL GOP is unlikely to make the same mistake again: if Jones (the Nazi) appears on the ballot again, he'll have opposition, and it will depants him.
† we flipped the House entirely with moderate Democrats, for what it's worth; the Bernie Sanders wing of the party didn't fare a whole lot better than Arthur Jones did in the IL-3
It's an underappreciated quirk of our politics that you can't just try to run in a district, just to see how it goes, and then try again somewhere else. You run and fail, and you're often damaged goods for any other race. A bunch of things in our legislative races make more sense when you grok that.
The party rejects this stuff, because ordinary voters reject it, and, contrary to Rayiner's belief, the Democratic party responds primarily to its voters, not to The Groups.