Off the deep end
By 
If you want to see what right wing populism actually looks like in its pure form, take a look at a governor’s race in a state like Colorado, where the Democratic candidate is going to win the general election by fifteen or twenty points.
The leading candidate by far in terms of fundraising is this guy, Victor Marx, a certifiable lunatic who has gone the full George Santos, making one wild claim after another about ahis more or less completely fictitious biography. (He is a “Christian minister,” aka a grifter with a tax deduction):
His political and ministry careers have been heavily scrutinized due to highly extraordinary personal claims. He has made public statements asserting he called in a U.S. military airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters, killed a man at age seven, and killed others while performing civilian missionary work overseas. These claims have led to intense questioning from media outlets, with critics and fact-checkers demanding evidence for his exploits.
Here’s what one of his two establishment GOP candidates looks like. That would be Scott Bottoms, who is a state representative from, naturally, Colorado Springs:
Bottoms again failed, when asked by debate moderators, to substantiate a long list of wild allegations he has made during his campaign for governor, including claims that he is working with federal law enforcement agencies to disrupt a pedophile ring operating at the state Capitol, and an assertion that the state is spending “hundreds of millions of dollars (on) illegal immigrant abortions and transgender surgeries.”
But he acknowledged, after talking to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, that he had erred in claiming during a debate last month that there were “45 to 50,000 Venezuelan cartel (members) in this state.”
“I got that one wrong,” Bottoms said Tuesday. “I misunderstood what the ICE agent was saying.”
Bottoms declined to distance himself from far-right podcaster Joe Oltmann, who has called for his political opponents to be executed by hanging, and referred to several of the state’s top Democratic elected officials — Polis, Weiser and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, all of whom are Jewish — as a “synagogue of Satan Jews.” Bottoms has appeared on Oltmann’s podcast and accepted his endorsement.
“Joe Oltmann and I disagree very strongly on the nation of Israel — very, very strongly,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with the Jewish people at all.”
Bottoms went on, however, to claim that he has been informed that federal indictments for sedition are “probably going to come down around midsummer” against Weiser and Griswold. And he indicated that as governor, he would likely offer Oltmann a role in his administration.
“Assuming it’s not around Jewish people? Probably,” Bottoms said.
The only potential non-crazy person among the three Republican candidates for the state’s top office is Barbara Kirkmeyer, who appears to be an old-style taxes are too high Republican, and who at least was willing to say that she wouldn’t issue a full pardon to Tina Peters, unlike her two opponents.
Marx: $2.7 million
Kirkmeyer: $565,956
Bottoms: $210,601
I haven’t looked, but I assume Democratic candidates for governor in places like Alabama and West Virginia aren’t advocating for the abolition of private property and making Christianity illegal, and that instead something like supoporting Medicare for All is the Both Sides equivalent of calling for medieval-style pogroms of prominent Jewish politicians.