POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The results of California’s recent Senate primary have demonstrated that there are 62,830 Californians who are Nazis or very willing to vote for Nazis.

In the primary, incumbent Diane Feinstein received 2,031,967 votes, or 44.2% of the 4,600,471 votes, and her challenger in the November general election, Kevin DeLeon, another Democrat, received 528,043 votes or 11.5% of the total. Five other candidates, all Republicans, received between 100,000 and 400,000 votes.

In this election, 62,830 votes represented only 1.4% of the total, but it was enough for that candidate to finish 12th.

The candidate who received those 62,830 votes is Patrick Little, a self-described “counter-Semite” who has very openly expressed his admiration of Adolf Hitler and who has placed himself memorably among Holocaust deniers by describing the death camps in this way: “’They had ice cream, swimming pools, orchestras, plays, they had soccer fields, soccer teams. They even had a whorehouse! I mean, shit, I’d like to take a vacation at Auschwitz.’”

It’s the sort of exuberantly abhorrent and ignorant comment that is very hard to forget even if you have seen or heard it just once. Indeed, in a widely reported pre-election poll, taken when only a few of the Republican candidates had yet announced, Little had received 18% support. So the subsequent attention to his views had a very obvious impact on that support.

Indeed, it is very hard to argue that any significant percentage of the 62,830 Californians who voted for Little were uninformed or somehow randomly picked his name. There were 32 candidates who received at least 2,000 votes. A sizable number of them were also Republicans, and two Republicans who finished just ahead of and behind Little are named John Crew and Jerry Laws: that is, there is rational explanation for why Little’s name should have stood out to uninformed voters. If anything, simply on the basis of their names, Laws would seem to have had a built-in advantage over Little.

But the other widely reported thing that Little said during his campaign was that he would “’not only offer what Trump was offering, but more.’” Although I am certain that other California Republicans have openly supported the President, I doubt that many Republicans, in California or elsewhere, have decided that it is a prudent election strategy to promise some even more pronounced version of what the President has been saying and doing.

But, clearly, for most, if not all, of the 62,830 Californians who voted for Little and for President Trump, what the President has been saying and doing is not nearly enough.