This campaign slogan has Republicans doomed in a ruby red state

Republican candidates this year face a difficult dilemma for which there is no easy solution: They can’t tell voters the truth and still win.

Take Kurt Alme, Montana’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate. He is accomplished and respected, but he entered the race through a maneuver to avoid a primary and accepted Donald Trump’s endorsement. That ties him to Trump’s record.

Does he support the widely documented corruption in the Trump administration? The use of Nazi-like “brownshirts” in the nation’s cities, often violent and lawless? A Justice Department targeting political enemies? A president who threatens judges and pardons violent offenders and white-collar criminals? How about a disgraceful $1.8 billion “Thug Fund,” potentially rewarding felons convicted of assaulting police officers?

The dilemma is clear: Alme cannot run on law and order while backing any of this. He also cannot run on advancing public health, promoting scientific research, racial justice, environmental protection, immigration reform, balanced energy policy, or free and fair elections — positions Republicans now openly oppose. Nor can Republicans run on the economy, fiscal responsibility, or national security.

Trump inherited a stable economy and blew it up with chaotic tariffs, unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy, mass deportations, and another unnecessary war. Inflation, prices, and the economy are getting worse by the day. Ask anyone. The deficit and debt have exploded. Trump now accounts for more of the $39 trillion U.S. national debt than any previous president, a fiscally unsustainable situation.

Allies are alienated. Dictators and indicted war criminals are embraced. National security is weaker. An unqualified political hack is now the nation’s Director of National Intelligence.

So, what’s left? Republicans can tout a tougher southern border and, for a conservative minority, the end of Roe vs. Wade. After that, a Republican candidate can run on bigotry, corruption, fiscal recklessness, undermining a free press, environmental degradation, disdain for the rule of law, assault on democratic institutions, holding Americans illegally in detainment camps, the Iran War debacle, and support for a president who has already tried to overturn an election once — and may try again.

How about working to ensure that only Republicans can get elected to Congress from the Deep South, while keeping Black Americans out of office? What a great campaign slogan! Jim Crow 2.0.

Then there are fellow candidates and Republican voters who still claim Trump won the 2020 election (63%), think Jan. 6, 2021 was a patriotic event, believe pro-Trump Russian election interference did not occur, and that the DOGE effort was really about waste, fraud, and abuse. All nonsense, of course.

Having delusional colleagues and base voters does not solve the Republican candidate’s dilemma. Nor does having a president who worries about ballrooms, triumphal arches and fascist-style banners of himself on public buildings – and not on problems facing Americans and the nation. All this while his Republican supporters are often referred to as a personality cult masquerading as a political party.

The final dilemma for the candidate is that the Republican Party is no longer considered pro-democracy. Sweden’s highly respected V-Dem Institute now ranks it as an illiberal political party (in other words, “authoritarian”). In 2025 Trump, with Republican support, led the largest one-year drop in the U.S. democratic index since 1789. A Republican in 2026 is, by affiliation alone, running as candidate opposed to American democracy.

It is a sad dilemma. Expect Republican candidates, having little of substance to run on, to call Democrats awful names, lie, rant about culture wars, avoid public meetings and hard questions, and hope the public is ignorant enough to give them a pass.

Let’s hope they are wrong.

David Darby, is political scientist with a background in democracy and foreign affairs, a former federal and Montana state official, and a senior US policy advisor to a dozen former communist countries. He is retired and lives in Billings.