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.<\/p>\n
Or so Marx says.<\/p>\n
But he was not just a precocious child. <\/p>\n
As an adult running a \u201chigh-risk\u201d 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\u2019s exorcised demons \u2014 and can do so over the telephone, he says, if need be.<\/p>\n
True or, most likely, false, those woolly claims and epic tales of derring-do aren\u2019t the weirdest thing about Marx.<\/p>\n
The weirdest thing is that Marx is the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado<\/a>, an actual part of these United States.<\/p>\n 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 <\/a>it took Colorado to count its ballots. Oh, wait. Never mind<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Although slender, Marx\u2019s 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\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s almost cult-like,\u201d Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado GOP chairman, said of Marx\u2019s support. \u201cYou talk to some of these people, and there is no doubt in their mind he will be governor, because God has decided that he\u2019s going to be governor.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s fat chance of that. (Please don\u2019t smite me.)<\/p>\n Colorado has elected only one Republican governor in the last 55 years, and that was back in 2002. It\u2019s 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 \u2014 after stomping U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet<\/a> in the primary \u2014 as it gets.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> currently occupying the White House.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n When asked, he hasn\u2019t backed off his fantastical claims. But Marx hasn\u2019t done a very good job substantiating them.<\/p>\n As a young boy growing up in Louisiana, he says, his abusive stepfather \u2014 the one who supposedly involved him in a satanic feline decapitation \u2014 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHow many people have you killed?\u201d Kyle Clark, an anchorman on Denver\u2019s 9News, asked the candidate in a persistent and revealing sit-down interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s important,\u201d Marx replied. \u201cIt\u2019s actually kind of \u2014 it\u2019s an odd question to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Actually, it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n (Conceding the Republican race, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer \u2014 the runner-up \u2014 conspicuously declined to endorse Marx, urging voters to \u201cchoose the path that is best for Colorado\u201d in November. \u201cFor the record,\u201d she added. \u201cI still haven\u2019t killed anyone.\u201d)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But his florid tales of youthful homicide, telephonic exorcisms, personally intercepting human smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border \u2014 well, not so much. <\/p>\n Most voters will probably have a hard time getting past those autobiographical extravagances, which could spell trouble \u2014 depressed GOP turnout, guilt by association \u2014 for other Colorado Republicans, including freshman Rep. Gabe Evans, who\u2019s fighting to hang onto a closely fought congressional seat in the north-central part of the state.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a loss Republicans can ill afford as they desperately seek to preserve <\/a>their bare House majority.<\/p>\n Despite its preference for Democratic governors, Colorado was, until not that long ago, a competitive two-party state<\/a>. It was a presidential battleground as recently as 2012<\/a>. Republicans held a majority in the state Senate as recently as 2018.<\/p>\n