For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.





A Republican candidate running for Rep. Chris “Craigslist” Lee’s seat in upstate New York isn’t doing his scandalized party any favors. Jack Davis, a local businessman vying for the seat, shocked local GOP leaders by suggesting that the area’s Hispanic farmworkers should be deported, and that inner city blacks should be bused in to pick the crops instead, as The Buffalo News reports.

Davis made the comments during a February 20 endorsement interview with local Republican Party leaders—and it’s not the first time he’s floated the idea. In 2008, Davis told another local paper: “We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities. Put them on buses, take them out there [to the farms] and pay them a decent wage; they will work.”

Local Republicans leaders have quickly distanced themselves from Davis’ inflammatory comments. “Maybe in 1860 that might have been seen by some as an appropriate comment, but not now,” Amherst GOP Chairman Marshall Wood told the Buffalo News. But Davis—who’s previously run for the seat as a Democrat—seems determined to continue his bid for the special election in May, casting himself as an anti-trade populist with tea party appeal.

What’s next? A state Republican arguing that the physically and mentally disabled should be euthanized or just sent to Siberia? Or that illegal immigrants should be shot from helicopters like “feral hogs”? Oh no—both of those things have already happened.