Honorary KKK member’ to be on Missouri GOP primary ballot, despite party objections

Among the nine Republican candidates running for Missouri governor, an “honorary Ku Klux Klan” member will be on the primary ballot, despite the best efforts of the GOP to remove him.

On his campaign website, Darrell Leon McClanahan III claims to be “the Conservative voice for Governor of Missouri.” He will be the first candidate to be listed on the GOP’s ballot.

The party’s lawyer, Lowell Pearson, made a last-ditch effort to remove him from the primary ballot by filing on Monday a notice of appeal to a previous decision that allowed him to remain. However, McClanahan’s lawyer says it’s too late.

McClanahan’s white supremacist beliefs have been out in the open since at least 2022, when he filed a lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League in which he claimed to only be “an honorary Ku Klux Klan” member. He had also attended the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest.

After filing for the governor’s race in February, photos of McClanahan surfaced online. Former Missouri state Rep. Shamed Dogan shared the photos to X, which showed McClanahan making the Nazi salute with a Klan member in front of a burning cross and posing with Knight Party leaders.

The GOP party moved immediately to remove McClanahan’s name from the ballot, but on May 17, Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker ruled that Darrell McClanahan III would remain on the ballot for the GOP nomination for governor.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the Missouri Republican Party for comment.

“There is literally no way that their appeal could succeed,” Roland said in an interview with the Missouri Independent. “They were only asking for one thing in their petition, and that was an injunction to prevent his name from being certified for the ballot. That ship sailed back in May when the secretary of state did exactly what the law required him to do, certifying the name for the ballot.”

On June 11, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft certified the list of state candidates and issues on the ballot and under state law the courts cannot “order an individual or issue be placed on the ballot less than eight weeks before the date of the election.”

Walker wrote that since the party had accepted McClanahan’s $500 fee, he would remain on the ballot. McClanahan was also a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022, and Walker says his views were known.

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The Republican Party “is a sophisticated entity and the record shows that it was not only aware of a party’s authority to reject a filing fee offered by a candidate,” Walker wrote, “but that segments of the Missouri Republican Party have already adopted a policy of rejecting filing fees from any candidate who has not completed a prescribed vetting process.”

It is unlikely that the court will rule on the GOP’s appeal before the primary.