More than 56,000 people voted to send Holocaust denier and white supremacist GOP nominee Art Jones to Congress in Illinois' 3rd District Tuesday night.
Jones ran against incumbent Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski, who captured 74 percent of the vote to return to Washington, D.C., for an eighth term.
But that left 26 percent of voters - roughly 56,944 people - who cast their ballots in favor of Jones, a former leader of the American Nazi Party who called the Holocaust as "the biggest, blackest lie in history" on his campaign website and has praised the leadership of Adolf Hitler.
The race results were all but guaranteed heading into the general election, as presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the solid-blue district with 55 percent in 2016.
Jones ran unopposed in the March Republican primary, racking up more than 20,000 votes to win the GOP nomination for the district, which includes a portion of Chicago and its west and southwest suburbs.
He has unsuccessfully run for elected office several times since the 1970s, including campaigning for the same district five times before.
In 2016, he failed to make the ballot after the Illinois Republican Party challenged his petition signatures.
Politics
But 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 chose to once again elect Lipinski to another term in the seat previously held by his father.
In declaring victory Tuesday night, Lipinski did not mention Jones by name, saying in a statement that the "results demonstrate that voters want more of my commonsense leadership that brings people together and has produced results."
According to Illinois State Board of Elections data, Lipinski's Republican opponent in 2014 earned just over 64,000 votes, which was around 32 percent - a higher number than Jones earned, though roughly 34,000 more people in the district voted in this year's election.
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 in March.
