ILLINOIS Republicans should have paid closer attention to the state’s third district, a Democratic fiefdom that includes a part of Chicago and its southwestern suburbs. Arthur Jones, a notorious neo-Nazi, will almost certainly win the Republican primary for the third district’s seat in the House of Representatives on March 20th because he is unopposed by any other Republican candidate. Mr Jones is a former member of the National Socialist White People’s Party and a variety of other Nazi groupings. He calls the Holocaust an “international extortion racket” and proudly displays racist and anti-Semitic bile on his website and blog.

This is deeply embarrassing for local Republicans. In a statement made to the Chicago Sun-Times, a local paper, Tim Schneider, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, said: “The Illinois Republican Party and our country have no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones. We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office, including the 3rd Congressional District.”

This will be the eighth time Mr Jones, a 70-year-old retired insurance broker, has run for Congress in Illinois. In 2016 the local Republican Party was more vigilant and managed to remove him from the ballot by challenging the signatures he had gathered on the petition to run for office. This meant that Daniel Lipinski, the Democratic incumbent, ran unopposed. (In the upcoming primaries Mr Lipinski is being challenged by Marie Newman, a newcomer.) This time Mr Jones was more cautious about the signatures he collected. The best way to block him would have been to field a credible Republican candidate to challenge him. It is now too late; the filing dateline for the primary's candidates was in December.

Nazis in Illinois have made the headlines before. In the 1970s a Nazi group won a fight in court to march in Skokie, a suburb of Chicago with a large Jewish community. Clad in full Nazi regalia, Mr Jones was one of the marchers. In “The Blues Brothers”, a film, John Belushi’s character, Jake and his buddy Elwood get stuck in traffic and ask a cop what is going on. “Ah, those bums won their court case, so they're marching today,” says the police officer. “What bums?” asks Jake. “The fucking Nazi party”, comes the reply. “Illinois Nazis,” shrugs Elwood. "I hate Illinois Nazis!" exclaims Jake, pushing the accelerator to charge towards the Nazi marchers, who are forced to jump off a bridge.

The only thing the Republican Party can do now to oppose Mr Jones is to back an independent or a write-in candidate (whose name would not appear on the ballot but could be written in by voters) for the election on November 6th. The deadline for filing such a candidacy is in June. It would not affect the outcome: Mr Lipinski or Ms Newman will win the seat. But it would stand as a rebuttal of Mr Jones’s vile ideology.