We Asked 28 GOP Officials If They’d Denounce the GOP Nominee Who Marched With Nazis in Charlottesville

This week I asked 28 current and former Republican Party officials in Florida whether they would denounce an unrepentant white supremacist in their ranks, a man who will appear on the ballot this November as a member of the GOP.

Maybe it’s a fool’s errand, in 2026, to ask the party of President Donald Trump to summon some sense of shame, or to see if there’s any limit to MAGA’s “never punch right” ethos. But I wanted to try. After all, the background of Marshall Rawson — the GOP nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives — is arguably  among the most extreme for an elected U.S. official since 1989, when David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, secured a seat in the Louisiana state legislature. 

On Monday I published one of my first investigations for Talking Points Memo, revealing that Rawson, who won an upset victory in the Florida District 10 GOP primary last month, marched with neo-Nazis (and incidentally, Duke himself) at the deadly 2017 “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

The investigation got a big response. The Washington Post, The New York Times, MS NOW, The New Republic, Politico, and The Independent all picked up on the story, as did local outlets like Charlottesville Weekly, the Tampa Bay Times, and WCJB the ABC affiliate for northcentral Florida — the rural, deeply red region Rawson is poised to represent at the Capitol in Tallahassee. 

On Wednesday, I called, emailed, and texted 28 GOP officials about Rawson. Twenty-two of these officials — former U.S. congressmen, a current Florida state representative, mayors, and county commissioners — had endorsed Rawson’s primary campaign. I wanted to see if the widely-discussed revelations about Rawson’s past might have moved them to reconsider. 

The other six officials I contacted are leaders in the party: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody; U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who recently secured the GOP nomination for governor; Tyler Sirois, the majority leader of the Florida state House; and Jim Boyd, the majority leader of the Florida Senate. 

My messages spelled out just how extreme Rawson is. For years, TPM found, Rawson was involved with League of the South, a racist and antisemitic neo-Confederate organization that advocates the secession of the southern states from the U.S. He’d made comments on social media condoning slavery, and calling for the execution of LGBTQ+ people. “Multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked,” an account that appears to be his wrote once. His campaign donors included dozens of white supremacists, according to a TPM tally, giving over $15,000. Videos and photos TPM obtained showed Rawson arriving at the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, joining a crowd of men carrying swastika flags, where he was greeted, by name, by League of the South members. He could be seen carrying his own flag, this one emblazoned with the black-cross symbol of League of the South. One photo showed him standing near James Alex Fields Jr., the neo-Nazi who a short time later drove his car into counter-protesters, injuring dozens and killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer. 

I emphasized in my messages that Rawson had neither denied the facts of my reporting, nor apologized for them, offering only a series of statements in which he acknowledged his attendance at “Unite the Right,” and insisting he’d “continue to defend historical monuments,” referring to a Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville. (“Alt-right” outrage over the statue’s slated removal in 2017 had served as a pretext for the rally.) 

“Throughout my primary campaign I was upfront and outspoken about my brief attendance at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville,” Rawson wrote on X this week after TPM published its investigation. He posted a video of himself speaking at a candidate forum earlier this summer in which he admitted to attending the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation. Rawson’s public admission was not reported in the press, nor was the video he posted made available to TPM when I reached out to him for comment. 

While I waited for GOP responses to come in, I read articles about some of the Republican men who’d endorsed Rawson. Former U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fl) made headlines for calling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “fucking bitch” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Former Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), for whom Rawson interned as a young college student, had gained national attention too, when footage showed him calling established science regarding evolution and the Big Bang “lies straight from the pit of Hell.” Former U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) was convicted of money laundering and defrauding campaign donors, sentenced to 10 years in prison, only to have his sentence commuted by President Trump. And Republican Florida state Rep. Mike Hill once joked about killing gay people. Another time, while responding to a tweet calling Islam a “cancer,” Hill wrote: “The sooner you expel the demonic Muslim horde, the better.” 

I also started to collect stories similar to TPM’s piece about Rawson— stories published just this summer that have laid bare what’s increasingly being called the GOP’s “Nazi problem.” The New York Times recently reported that Nate Hochman — the right-wing operative fired by Gov. DeSantis’s 2024 presidential campaign over a video he’d posted that included a Sonnenrad, a symbol used by German Nazis during World War II — had landed a new gig: chief speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

In Georgia, Republican Senate nominee Mike Collins appears to be surrounded by extremists. One of Collins’ former campaign staffers had posted an AI-generated photo of himself in the white robe of the Ku Klux Klan. In other posts, uncovered by the Washington Post, he called himself a “twink fascist” and posted the swastika symbol of Nazi Germany. CNN reported that another associate of Collins’ campaign — his own son-in-law — was “a pro-White nationalist” social media influencer “with a track record of sharing antisemitic material and Nazi imagery in comments across the internet.” 

In Ohio, Republican Senator Jon Husted, who is running to keep the Senate seat handed to him when J.D. Vance became vice president, recently pushed out his political director after revelations that the staffer had featured an image of German Nazi soldiers in the profile picture of his social media account. 

In Texas, the GOP nominee for a seat in the U.S. House, Brandon Herrera, can be seen in a video using a Nazi submachine gun he calls the “original ghetto blaster” and “Hiter’s street sweeper.” He then literally goose-steps to a song that was sung by World War II-era Nazis. 

There have been scattered, lonely attempts by Republicans to distance the party from these figures. Most recently, as Josh Kovensky noted in TPM, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) begged his party to speak out against Bo French, the GOP nominee for Texas railroad commissioner. Last weekend, French posted a photo of non-white students cheering on the University of Texas football team, calling them “a problem” that’s “now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” French, in another post, added: “social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” 

“This is the Republican nominee for statewide office,” Sen. Cornyn wrote on X. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.  This is how great political parties self-destruct.  Sad.” 

Out of the 28 GOP officials I contacted about Rawson, only three responded. 

“I’m not going to platform nonsense about Marshall,” Tim Marden, the mayor of Newberry, Florida and one of Rawson’s endorsers, told Talking Points Memo in an email. “He deserves to serve because the voters chose him by an overwhelming margin.  You don’t matter. I don’t matter. The voters do. That’s the end of it.” 

George Thomas, the mayor of Fort White, Florida and another Rawson endorser, kindly told me that my TPM investigation had not swayed him. “To be honest with you, that doesn’t change my endorsement of him,” Thomas said. “I continue to endorse him. I personally hope he does win the election here in November.” 

I tried emphasizing that Rawson had called for the execution of gay people. That he’d advocated lynching. That he’d condoned slavery. That he’d marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Surely all of this should be disqualifying for elected office? 

But these weren’t part of Rawson’s public policy agenda, Thomas insisted. There was no way Rawson would act on these views as a legislator — he’d be laughed out of the Capitol building in Tallahassee. Rawson was pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, and cared about Florida agriculture. That was enough for Thomas. Plus, he added, Rawson had personally courted him for an endorsement, even though he has a mixed-race background and is of Cuban descent. Rawson, Thomas said, had treated him with the “utmost respect.” 

The only other response I got on Wednesday was from Byron Donalds, the congressmen and recently-minted GOP nominee for Florida governor. Donalds, who is Black, sent Talking Points memo a boilerplate statement that did not mention Rawson at all. 

“I denounce racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry in all of its vile forms,” Donalds said. “The Republican Party is the Party that was created to free slaves and fight for the civil rights of all Americans – I will continue that proud legacy as Florida’s next Governor.”

Neither the Florida GOP or the national Republican Party responded to repeated requests for comment for this story. 

On Thursday morning, Rawson posted a photo of himself on X standing alongside members of the University of Florida College Republicans. The group was reinstated by the university only a few days ago. It had been disbanded earlier this year, in March, after two members were photographed performing Nazi salutes. 

“Who cares about the lying media when  the largest and most active College Republican chapter in the United States is behind you!” Rawson wrote.