When Victor Marx was 3 years old, he was forced into a voodoo ritual involving a beheaded cat. At age 7, he killed a man.
Or so Marx says.
But he was not just a precocious child.
As an adult running a “high-risk” Christian ministry, Marx says he rescued 45,000 women and children from captivity and abuse. As a civilian, he supposedly called in a U.S. military airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters. He’s exorcised demons — and can do so over the telephone, he says, if need be.
True or, most likely, false, those woolly claims and epic tales of derring-do aren’t the weirdest thing about Marx.
The weirdest thing is that Marx is the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado, an actual part of these United States.
A political newcomer, Marx eked out his victory in a three-way race by less than 2,500 votes out of more than 520,000 cast. (It took almost nine days to declare a winner, but surely you knew that already, given the national outcry over how long it took Colorado to count its ballots. Oh, wait. Never mind.)
Although slender, Marx’s victory delivered a strong statement: about the grave condition of mainstream Republicanism; about the increasing embrace of oddity and extremism by a deeply disaffected slice of the American electorate; about the unsettled and unsettling nature of today’s politics.
“It’s almost cult-like,” Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado GOP chairman, said of Marx’s support. “You talk to some of these people, and there is no doubt in their mind he will be governor, because God has decided that he’s going to be governor.”
There’s fat chance of that. (Please don’t smite me.)
Colorado has elected only one Republican governor in the last 55 years, and that was back in 2002. It’s been 10 years since a Republican won any statewide office. The Democratic nominee, Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser, is as close to a November shoo-in — after stomping U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the primary — as it gets.
But Marx, 61, a former Marine and expert in martial arts, is nothing if not swaggering. His role model is, of course, the political disrupter and fabulist-in-chief currently occupying the White House.
Like President Trump, Marx relies heavily on personal charisma, a strong social media presence and the purposeful shunning of campaign norms which, to the politically alienated, speaks to his independence from the establishment and offers a welcome break from the same old, same old.
He casts himself as a problem-solver and negotiator par excellence. He skimps on policy and skipped most of the preprimary debates; at the one he did attend, Marx brought his dog, a Dutch shepherd, onstage. In lieu of a closing statement, Marx prayed.
When asked, he hasn’t backed off his fantastical claims. But Marx hasn’t done a very good job substantiating them.
As a young boy growing up in Louisiana, he says, his abusive stepfather — the one who supposedly involved him in a satanic feline decapitation — drove him to rural Mississippi, where Marx shot and killed a man. Police told Colorado Public Radio they had no record of any unsolved homicides from that time.
“How many people have you killed?” Kyle Clark, an anchorman on Denver’s 9News, asked the candidate in a persistent and revealing sit-down interview.
“I don’t think that’s important,” Marx replied. “It’s actually kind of — it’s an odd question to me.”
Actually, it’s not.
(Conceding the Republican race, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer — the runner-up — conspicuously declined to endorse Marx, urging voters to “choose the path that is best for Colorado” in November. “For the record,” she added. “I still haven’t killed anyone.”)
In many ways, Marx is a mainstream conservative Republican. He founded All Things Possible Ministries, a Christian nonprofit that tends to refugees and other victims of trauma. His focus on law and order, tax relief, small government and deregulation are all standard GOP fare.
But his florid tales of youthful homicide, telephonic exorcisms, personally intercepting human smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border — well, not so much.
Most voters will probably have a hard time getting past those autobiographical extravagances, which could spell trouble — depressed GOP turnout, guilt by association — for other Colorado Republicans, including freshman Rep. Gabe Evans, who’s fighting to hang onto a closely fought congressional seat in the north-central part of the state.
It’s a loss Republicans can ill afford as they desperately seek to preserve their bare House majority.
Despite its preference for Democratic governors, Colorado was, until not that long ago, a competitive two-party state. It was a presidential battleground as recently as 2012. Republicans held a majority in the state Senate as recently as 2018.
But the MAGA-fication of the state GOP has hastened Colorado’s evolution from political battleground to a solidly blue bastion.
“The Colorado Republican Party right now is impotent and irrelevant,” said Wadhams, who fought unsuccessfully against its takeover by Trump-worshiping zealots. “The ironic twist to this story is that polling has shown over the past several months that voters are getting restless about what they see as the decline of Colorado in terms of education, energy, roads and transportation.”
Just last week, the annual Colorado Health Foundation issued its annual Pulse Poll, a dour report card on the state of the state that found three-quarters of respondents were concerned they may not be able to live there in the future.
But don’t expect Democrats to lose their sovereignty anytime soon.
That’s what happens when a party and its voters stop seriously competing and instead indulge their passions and fever dreams. You get candidates, and political caricatures, like Victor Marx.
God help us.