GOP candidates trying to unseat longtime incumbent lawmaker are refusing to bring up his racist past

After years of Rep. Steve King (R-IA) calling immigrants drug mules, demanding American society be more "homogeneous," and giving racist interviews to far-right European parties, Republicans have finally moved to disown him. They stripped him of all his committee assignments last year, and now several GOP groups are running ads in favor of his primary challenger, state Sen. Randy Feenstra.

There's just one catch, according to the Huffington Post: many of these Republicans targeting King aren't actually attacking his white supremacist beliefs.

"The Republicans hoping to defeat white supremacist Rep. Steve King in Tuesday’s primary in Iowa all have similar arguments for why King doesn’t deserve a tenth term in Congress. He’s ineffective, they say. Too caustic. A political liability for the party," wrote Christopher Mathias. "What you won’t hear these Republicans argue is that King is racist."

"The anti-King television ads currently bombarding voters in Iowa’s conservative 4th Congressional District make no mention of him endorsing white nationalist political candidates, or promoting neo-Nazis on Twitter, or talking about the Great Replacement conspiracy theory," continued the report. "'Whatever you think of Steve King, it’s clear he’s no longer effective,' conservative evangelical Christian leader Bob Vander Plaats says at the beginning of one ad released earlier this month. 'He can’t deliver for President Trump, and he can’t deliver conservative values.'"

"The ad — created by a PAC called Priorities for Iowa, run by the former chief of staff of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds — is part of a larger effort by a powerful coalition of GOP figures to oust King," said the report. "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a handful of Republican members of the House, GOP operative Karl Rove, and an assortment of conservative groups and PACs have banded together to end King’s two-decade congressional career and install their preferred primary challenger, Randy Feenstra, a former state senator."

"But this coordinated GOP effort — which polls show has a shot at succeeding — isn’t really marketing itself as a principled rebuke of King’s bigotry. Neither Feenstra or most of his Republican backers call King racist in public," said the report. "When they argue King is ineffective, pointing to how GOP leadership stripped him of his committee assignments, they don’t dwell on why GOP leadership took those committee seats away in the first place: as punishment for comments King made condoning white supremacy."

“They won’t say it publicly, but you talk to a lot of Republicans in this state privately, and they do think he’s a racist,” said Iowa Starting Line editor Pat Rynard. “They’re fed up with it. They just don’t have the guts to say it that much in person because they know there’s enough Republican voters who either agree with him or think that aspect of King is overhyped.”

The state's down-ballot primaries, including King's for Iowa's 4th Congressional District, will take place next Tuesday.