The new ‘mega Maga’ Republicans taking the midterms by storm

A new generation of “Maga Republicans” is poised to enter the US Congress, with hundreds of candidates who “threaten democracy” potentially on track to win seats, the US president has warned.

Joe Biden “hesitated to name names”, the Washington Examiner’s politics editor W. James Antle III, wrote, but in an address in New Mexico the president said there were 350 “election deniers” on the Republican ticket in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Who are the ‘Maga Republicans’?

According to Antle, Biden has “vacillated” about who he thinks deserves the label of Maga, or Make America Great Again, Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral slogan. Sometimes he has attached it to the “GOP [Grand Old Party, as the Republican Party is known] brand as a whole” and at other times he has said “he is only talking about specific, if disproportionately influential, people” within the party, Antle said.

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Biden has said “he has no quarrel with rank-and-file Republican voters” but has also warned repeatedly that “democracy is on the ballot” at these elections.

The president has, however, implied that the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is a Maga Republican, though he has usually declined to go much further in overtly calling individuals out.

Political commentators and news organisations have not shared the president’s discretion about the group he has sometimes branded “mega-Maga”.

In a recent report, The Guardian called local news anchor Kari Lake, the GOP’s candidate for Arizona governor, the “telegenic new face of Maga Republicanism”.

Lake’s contest with Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs will “test the strength of Donald Trump’s enduring influence on the Republican party and its supporters”, the paper said.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, has identified Anna Paulina Luna as being among a “new class of combative Maga candidates poised to roil House GOP”.

The self-proclaimed “pro-life extremist” is a “stolen-election believer,” the paper said. The Florida congressional candidate has frequently appeared on far-right talk shows hosted by one-time Trump adviser Steve Bannon, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and the misinformation blog Gateway Pundit.

Alongside Luna, Mike Collins, who’s running for a safe Republican House seat in Georgia, and Jim Jordan, who is running in Ohio, all have the support of the campaign arm of the House Freedom Caucus, the “hard-line bloc that has evolved from its early days as a secretive tea party brotherhood to become the de facto vehicle for most of the House Republicans closely aligned with Trump’s Make America Great Again movement,” The Washington Post said.

Others with the support of the Freedom Caucus include Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Michael Cloud of Texas and Mary Miller of Illinois.

What do they want?

Members of the Freedom Caucus are “among the most conservative of House Republicans”, said the Pew Research Center.

Specifically, in the immediate term, they will want to stop the Biden administration from achieving its agenda. This is the plan of Jim Jordan, who is a Freedom Caucus “elder statesman”, according to the Grid, and was described by one aide as “the heart of the Freedom Caucus”.

“Grind it to a halt”, Jordan told the Hold the Line podcast late last year. “This is how American politics works. You frame it up for 2024.”

Could they actually help the Democrats?

Biden is using Maga Republicans as “foils for his closing midterm pitch”, said CNN.

For months, Biden has been hoping to use Florida’s “constellation of Trump-aligned Republicans” to “galvanize Democratic voters”, the broadcaster said.

“You can’t shake a stick (in Florida) without hitting a Republican that represents the Maga extremes that the president is talking about,” a senior Biden adviser said. “So, it allows the president to really drive home what’s at stake and what the choice is.”

The message seems to be getting through. A majority of Americans (58%) believe former president Trump and his Maga movement poses a threat to democracy, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll. One in four Republicans agreed, while 60% said they didn’t believe Trump’s movement represents the majority of their party, the poll said.