Rep. Dan Lipinski won a decisive victory in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District Tuesday night, NBC News projected, handily defeating his white supremacist Republican opponent Art Jones.
Lipinski won 71.5 percent of the vote with 96.2 percent of precincts reporting by 11 p.m., while Jones earned 28.5 percent of the vote.
The race results were all but guaranteed heading into the general election, but the race remained one to watch to see just how many voters would cast their ballots for Jones, a Holocaust denier and former leader of the American Nazi Party.
As of Tuesday night, it appears that number was more than 56,500.
Jones ran unopposed in the March Republican primary, racking up more than 20,000 votes to win the GOP nomination.
While he has unsuccessfully run for elected office several times since the 1970s, appearing on a general election ballot was a significant victory for Jones, who refers to the Holocaust as "the biggest, blackest lie in history" on his campaign website and has praised the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
Jones ran for the same district five times before, including in 2016, when he failed to make the ballot after the Illinois Republican Party challenged his petition signatures.
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In 2017 however, the state GOP declined to challenge Jones' candidacy or run another candidate, clearing his path to the Republican nomination. Just before the March primary, the party denounced Jones, with the chairman saying in a statement that the country has "no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones."
There were two write-in candidates, Justin Hanson and Kenneth Yerkes, though voters in the solidly-blue district will send Lipinski back to Congress for a seventh term in the seat previously held by his father.
Lipinski - a conservative, anti-abortion member of the party - won a narrow 2-point victory over a strong progressive challenger in the Democratic primary for the district, where Hillary Clinton took 55 percent of the vote in 2016.
