In past years, EA (and its less active and now Dead on the Web predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard) would issue a list of “The Dirty Dozen” candidates on the ballot in approaching elections that were, by any reasonable measure, unfit for elected office. I always made a point of dividing the election blacklist evenly between Republicans and Democrats; it wasn’t hard, and wouldn’t be hard to do for this election, either. Policy positions usually weren’t the criteria, unless a particular position was especially dangerous or per se revolting. I haven’t checked if advocating “reparations” would get someone on the list; as I recall, no. “Defunding the police” is so idiotic that I now believe it would justify blacklisting, but in the past, my threshold for stupidity was higher: it took something like that GOP moron who asserted that the female body knew that rape wasn’t legit so it would not permit a pregnancy after non-consensual sex.
Here is the list of things that would not get a candidate on the list, as last stated in 2024:
- Isolated verbal gaffes that are plausibly innocent mistakes.
- Unsubstantiated accusations, rumors or suppositions.
- Embarrassing private photos that pre-date the candidate’s political career.
- Any conduct, statement or opinion that was not a crime or that did not cause genuine harm occurring in college or more than two decades ago.
- Reversals in policy positions or actions inconsistent with campaign promises, that can reasonable be attributed to changed circumstances, new perspective, justifiable political strategy, or a good faith change in opinion.
- Mere associations or friendships with individuals who have shady or questionable reputations.
- Almost anything said in a private conversation that has been recorded or allegedly overheard, other than criminal conspiracies and admissions of corruption.
- Any inappropriate action or comment for which the candidate apologizes freely, spontaneously, credibly and sincerely.
- Representations of unpopular or unsavory clients in a candidate’s legal career.
- Misconduct by the candidate’s family members that had not been denied, covered up, or enabled by the candidate.
Or membership in a particular political party. In short, the criteria was ethical, not partisan. In 2024, the “Dirty Dozen” became the “Untrustworthy Twenty,” because the quality of our elected officials and the candidates for office have, amazingly, gotten ethically and intellectually worse. Lauren Boebert was on the list, because she is a screaming embarrassment to democracy, the Founders, her state, the Congress, her sex, height and just about everything else. So was Mitch McConnell and Byron Donalds, President Trump’s favorite black Republican.
However, in 2026 it seems naive to even try to assemble a bipartisan blacklist when one entire political party has made it clear as quartz that its mission is to undermine our government for the foreseeable future, beginning with a repeat of the unethical impeachments and contrived investigations they have employed since 2016 to prevent the elected President of the United States from governing.
The Democratic Party has devolved into an unethical party, top to bottom, and it has corrupted a dangerous number of Americans. In a sane society, a party that has chosen to die on such metaphorical hills as open boarders, “good discrimination,” aka. DEI, the climate change scam, the Epstein files, allowing trans women in women’s sports, refusing to enforce “reasonable” theft, demonizing Israel and Jews, packing the Supreme Court, enforced viewpoint conformity in universities, turning the military into a sensitivity and social justice cult, permitting unassimilatable cultures to flood the country with the results we are seeing in Europe, and more would be trailing the Green Party in membership and support. But this is the Age of the Great Stupid, and Democrats leaped at the chance to be its engine: all the better to gain the power to crush dissent and opposition.
