Run for President, Kill Your Career

Representative Thaddeus McCotter is in a serious bind. Last year the five-term Michigan Republican, who’s earned a certain oddball fame as a guitar-plucking guest on the late-night Fox News show Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld, launched the longest of long-shot campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination—evidently believing his tiny cult following of insomniac conservatives would deliver him the White House. That didn’t work out. McCotter couldn’t muster the 1 percent support in national polls necessary to participate in the debates. He dropped out in September.

Instead, he decided to run for another term in Congress—only to discover that he and his staff had apparently neglected the elementary task of collecting enough signatures to get his name on the ballot. Michigan’s secretary of state determined that he’d submitted only 244 of the necessary 2,000 valid signatures. Election officials found that hundreds of the documents the campaign turned in were duplications or had been crudely doctored, and are investigating what they called an “unprecedented level” of fraud. McCotter says he was sabotaged, or someone on his staff made a terrible mistake. Either way, hanging onto his seat won’t be easy. On May 29 he announced he would be forced to run as a write-in candidate. Despite his troubles, McCotter doesn’t regret running for president. “I wanted to make sure my message was out there for the public to consider,” he says.