Connecticut Republicans finally rejected the Christian extremist they never vetted
Jadon MacCormack became a GOP nominee despite endorsing Holocaust denial and vicious anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. He just got a humiliating reality check.
This newsletter is free and goes out to over 25,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can subscribe via Patreon or the Subscribe button below! You can also make one-time donations through Venmo, CashApp, or PayPal.
Republicans in Connecticut have successfully prevented Christian extremist Jadon MacCormack from winning his GOP primary. But only after they initially ignored him, allowed him to be their party’s nominee for a State House seat, and realized only after the fact that his beliefs were truly despicable even for conservatives.
On Tuesday night, MacCormack lost his primary race after scraping together just over 100 votes in the state’s 50th District:
This was a massive victory for the Republican Party in a race that no one was otherwise paying attention to.
How did we even get to this point?
The problem began earlier this spring, After their nominating convention in May, Republicans had no candidates for 31 (out of 151) House seats… and some of the districts were ceded over to the only person who offered to run. That’s how MacCormack became the sole Republican option for this district. There was no vetting; the 23-year-old homeschooled bigot was just the dude who raised his hand.
It was only after he became the default nominee that everyone realized how much of a religious extremist he was. For example, to mark the beginning of Pride Month, he wished everyone a “Happy Straight Month”:
As your State Representative, I, Jadon MacCormack, would stand firmly against the Transgender and LGBT movement that has for too long corrupted our families, undermined parental authority, and eroded the foundational values of our society. This ideology promotes confusion over clarity, prioritizes feelings over biological reality, and seeks to redefine the natural order of marriage, family, and human identity in ways that directly contradict God-given rights and common sense.
I will fight relentlessly in the state legislature to protect our children from premature medical interventions, indoctrination in schools, and the normalization of perverse ideologies that threaten the innocence of the next generation.
That was relatively tame. In 2025, when the Supreme Court hinted that it’d be open to overturning the Obergefell ruling that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, MacCormack said we’d be better off if gay people were hanged. Because Bible.
He also endorsed Holocaust denial…
… and supported the view that we should “make being a homo illegal again”…
Given all that, how did MacCormack become a candidate for office? Clearly, there was no vetting involved. The irony was that Republicans had a real chance of winning this race. District 50 has been represented by Democrat Pat Boyd since 2017, but that hasn’t always been automatic. While Boyd ran unopposed in 2020 and 2024, he won with only 53% of the vote in 2022, 57% of the vote in 2018, and 55% of the vote in 2016.
In other words, if Republicans ran a halfway-decent candidate, they might have a shot at flipping this district.
MacCormack, however, wasn’t a halfway-decent candidate. He wasn’t even close to that. And once his old posts began to resurface, it became apparently that Democrats would use them to drag down everyone in the party while Republicans would have to pretend like they didn’t know the guy at all. (Which would be ironic given that Republicans embrace Donald Trump, a man whose racism, sexism, and outright bigotry toward immigrants and women and non-Christians and everyone who dares to ask him a non-softball question is so glaringly evident.)
It wasn’t just his own words, either. His X/Twitter post history included a LOT of shares of New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preachers, like Steven Anderson and Jonathan Shelley. Anderson has previously celebrated the deaths of murdered LGBTQ people and called on the government to execute gay people with a firing squad. His sermons have been so outrageously awful that 34 countries won’t allow him to step foot within their borders. (I spoke with two of their more popular preachers a couple of summers agin.)
MacCormack said at the time that he wasn’t a New IFB member himself—more of an old school IFB guy—but the tactics and dehumanizing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric were basically the same.
In an interview with me back in late June, rather than distance himself from any of the bigots, MacCormack doubled down on his hateful rhetoric (while proving that not all young people are tech savvy).
Instead of letting him just continue running, however, Republicans had one other option.
Even though MacCormack was the Party’s official candidate and a lock for a ballot position in November, they could petition to have an alternative candidate run against him in a primary. So the party threw their resources behind getting Anthony “Tony” Emilio, a local politician, on the ballot. It worked. The advantage was that Emilio was essentially a boring, non-controversial Republican… the polar opposite of MacCormack. Even if Emilio lost in November, it’s not like his candidacy would interfere with anyone else’s.
And on Tuesday night, Emilio won that primary by a comfortable margin. He’ll be the only Republican on the ballot against Boyd this November. In a Facebook post celebrating his victory, there was no mention whatsoever of MacCormack:
If the GOP thought they might get some unity now that the primary is over, however, they were mistaken. MacCormack reacted to his loss by insisting, “I, Jadon E. MacCormack, am the true winner in this Republican party.” (That’s a hell of a way to announce you lost. Also, no, he wasn’t the “true winner” or the symbolic winner or the spiritual winner. He took second in a two-man race, making him the True Loser.)
He also suggested he’d be running for Congress in two years, so this was just a blip along the way. (When I asked him for comment, he just send me a link to this statement.)
I, Jadon E. MacCormack, am the true winner in this Republican party. I have seen and exposed scandals while calling out unethical behavior. I have not backed down and never will. Connecticut needs the Second Congressional leadership I have already demonstrated. Full sights set on 2028; MacCormack for Congress!
A small district race with fewer than 500 votes cast is a clear reflection of the Republican Party’s failure. Thirty-plus uncontested Democrat seats across the state, while the GOP scrambles to field a candidate in three days, tells the whole story. I will reform this party and Make America Straight Again.
God is on my side, and I know many supporters remain. As for Troubled Tony: you may have won the battle, but go back to the retirement home you came from. We do not need leaders with one foot already in the grave; men who never wanted to run until someone became “controversial” and the GOP needed a last-minute handout doesn’t make you a patriot but a pathetic pawn.
The entire post emanates “sore loser” all the way through…
And while a State House seat may go under the radar, as this one did until the last second, a Congressional race (that’s a reliably blue seat!) will not. So the idea that MacCormack can even make it through a GOP primary for that race is laughable. As if they’re going to just cede the seat to him like they did in District 50. In other words, MacCormack still hasn’t figured out that this primary race was the high point in his political career.
Not that he’s worried. He already has a campaign website ready to go… full of Lorem Ipsum garbage, naturally.
And just to prove he’s learned nothing from this whole experience, the Facebook page for his impending congressional campaign already boasts “Make America Straight Again 2.0”… instead of anything that would actually make voters’ lives better. At a time when voters are clamoring for “affordability,” less corruption, and basic competence, this guy wants voters to know his only issue is promoting hate.
(Hey, look at that. 185 followers. That’s already way more than the number of votes he got on Tuesday.)
Anyone who follows politics could have seen this all coming from a mile away.
Republicans were never going to let MacCormack drag them down if they could help it, he was never going to earn much support because there’s nothing in his platform to make anyone’s lives better, his campaign appeared to be entirely online (which really doesn’t work for local elections), and he failed to understand that a key element of politics (especially when you’re in the minority) is at least pretending to be moderate.
The only bit of good news here is that MacCormack will be a thorn in the GOP’s side for years to come. He’s their problem because they refuse to purge their party of bigots. He feels at home among Republicans, which says a lot about why the party as a whole can’t be trusted.
But for now, at least, they dodged a bullet and can just focus on losing District 50 in November instead of having MacCormack harm the rest of their candidates too.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
Although this fool is more extreme than most, I can’t remember a time when Republicans weren’t blaming all the country’s problems on one group or another. I have two grand children who are older than this fool, and they’re both better educated. People get sucked down the right wing rabbit hole and surround themselves with like minded people. It leaves them convinced the whole world agrees with them.
This story is frankly stunning. It is also exceptionally important, in that at least one state Republican party has chosen to challenge and work against a candidate who is so obviously bigoted and biased that, to use the phrase of a favorite fictional doctor of mine, "A blind man could see it with a cane." Jadon MacCormack clearly had no problem saying the quiet part out loud, likely thinking that, since Trump does much the same thing virtually all the time, that he had the same right. And he does. It's just that in THIS case, he ran into consequences from his own party.
I thank the Connecticut Republican Party for stepping up and dealing with MacCormack and the clear problem he represents. One state down, 49 to go.