MacArthur has denied allegations that the mailer constitutes evidence of racial animus, pointing out that he has adopted two children from Korea, as if his family composition somehow affects his party’s interests in making craven appeals to his constituents’ worst impulses. “Some fish on a piece of paper is suddenly racist? What is racist about a picture of fish?” he asked, presumably rhetorically, of the Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board last week. “It’s not a racist font. It’s a font meant to stand out.” The obvious fact that a font can stand out because it is racist seems not to have occurred to him.

As elections draw nearer and politicians come to grips with the distinct possibility that they might fail to attain a very-publicly-stated goal, attack ads always become deafening in the campaign’s final weeks, and they often stray from the proverbial issues on which the candidates claim to want to focus. But when the going gets tough, only one of the two major American political parties has a persistent habit of getting racist—and, especially of late, with no longer bothering with the brand of wink-wink subtlety in which Republican politicians usually trade. The MacArthur mailer didn’t actually need to mention anything about Andy Kim’s taxes (or his platform, or anything else about him) in order to get its most important message across.

Part of this tendency stems from the fact that the modern Republican Party depends on the enthusiasm of bigots in order to cobble together election-winning coalitions. But it is also attributable to the fact that the modern Republican Party’s agenda is deeply unpopular, and the more voters learn about what the Ryans and McConnells and Trumps of the world want, they less excited they become about lending their support. For GOP candidates, it pays to invite a nasty identity-politics fight, because every day they spend indignantly fighting the PC police is another one where they won’t have to discuss their positions on issues of substance. Their optimal strategy for winning in spite of themselves is to avoid such questions for as long as humanly possible.