A far-right Republican with neo-Nazi ties who marched at the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., was elected to the Florida state legislature on Tuesday.

Marshall Rawson, 34, defeated Democrat Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson by roughly 36 percentage points to represent Florida’s heavily Republican 10th House District.

Rawson’s election comes following extensive reporting documenting his ties to the League of the South, which the Anti-Defamation League has identified as a white supremacist group. He has also drawn scrutiny for extremist social media posts, including praising Uganda’s law imposing the death penalty for certain same-sex relations and invoking biblical justifications for slavery, according to Talking Points Memo. 

In a 2023 Facebook post, Rawson shared a photograph of himself and his then-fiance holding a sign reading “Support Christian Marriage,” describing the couple as having demonstrated against what he called the “anti-Christ terror firm” Southern Poverty Law Center nearly a decade earlier. He accused the civil rights organization of “perverting the definition of marriage in our courts” and falsely claimed it was involved in throwing Molotov cocktails and bricks at law enforcement. Rawson said he would continue to stand for “Christian ethics” and against what he called “Godless activist lawyers.”

TPM reported that Rawson marched at the Charlottesville rally — where demonstrators holding torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” — carrying a League of the South flag. White supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered at the rally to protest the removal of a Confederate monument. It turned deadly when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Footage of the rally showed Rawson in close physical proximity to Fields. 

Rawson’s activity, which resurfaced in September, did not appear to deter support for him among Florida Republicans. Ahead of the election, TPM contacted 28 current and former Republican officials, including 22 who had endorsed his campaign, asking whether they would denounce his participation in Charlottesville and his past statements. None publicly did so.

Rawson has defended his attendance at the rally, saying he went to protest the removal of the Confederate monument and did not anticipate the violence.