Holocaust Denier Republican nominee for Congress in Chicago

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Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier described as a Nazi by the Illinois Republican Party, won the Republican primary on Tuesday in the state’s Third Congressional District, a heavily Democratic district that includes part of Chicago and its suburbs, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Jones, 70, unsuccessfully sought the nomination five times before, and his victory on Tuesday was a foregone conclusion after the Republican Party failed to draft another candidate to enter the race against him.

“Even if only myself and my wife voted for me, I’d win the primary because the Republican Party screwed up big time,” Mr. Jones said in an interview.

The Illinois Republican Party has sought to distance itself from Mr. Jones in recent weeks, blanketing the district with campaign fliers and robocalls urging voters to “stop Illinois Nazis,” according to a robocall script provided by the party. Mr. Jones said he had received three robocalls himself.


“Arthur Jones is not a real Republican — he is a Nazi whose disgusting, bigoted views have no place in our nation’s discourse,” Tim Schneider, the Illinois Republican Party chairman, said in a statement. He said the party had urged voters “to skip over his name when they go to the polls” and moving forward planned on “vehemently opposing Jones with real campaign dollars.”

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A spokesman for the Illinois Republican Party said those dollars would be used to support an independent candidate in the November general election. Party leaders are in talks with several potential candidates, the spokesman said, but have not yet decided which one to endorse.

The Third Congressional District of Illinois has not been represented by a Republican since 1975, and few people, besides Mr. Jones, believe he has a chance of winning the general election in November. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat, has represented the district in Congress since 2005, and before that it was represented by his father, Bill Lipinski, since 1993.

Mr. Jones is a former member of the American Nazi Party and has been active in the white supremacist movement for years. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, Mr. Jones said, he founded a conservative campus newspaper and attended meetings of both the Young Republicans and a Nationalist Socialist student group.

He later ran for mayor of Milwaukee as a member of the National Socialist White People’s Party in 1976. He finished fourth in the nonpartisan primary, receiving roughly 5,000 votes, and moved to Illinois the following year, he said.

“This stuff about being a Nazi, that’s in the past,” Mr. Jones said on Monday. But his campaign website contains a page devoted to the Holocaust, which he said in an interview was “a greatly overblown nonevent” and “an international extortion racket.”