Fact check: Which party has been more associated with extremist groups since 2015?

1. Why multiple investigations point to a Republican problem, not a single scandal

Investigative articles through 2024–2025 highlight institutional channels linking far-right groups to Republican politics, including lobby groups, activist training organizations, and state parties that have adopted extremist ideologies or personnel. Reporters documented the Conservative Partnership Institute’s ties and influence, warning it has been a vector for far-right ideas into Republican policymaking and staffing networks ^[1]. State-level reporting from 2021 documented an ongoing trend of state Republican organizations embracing QAnon, white nationalist rhetoric and conspiratorial politics, indicating the problem is structural rather than isolated ^[2]. These accounts are contemporaneous and mutually reinforcing across years.

2. Hard-right organizations and youth movements that amplified radical messaging

Reporting and year-in-review work from 2024–2025 flag specific conservative organizations that grew influential and disseminated extremist ideas, including campus and youth-focused groups that mainstream conservative messaging while normalizing white nationalist or Christian nationalist themes. A 2025 case study on Turning Point USA and affiliated networks describes an expansion of influence and ideology into conservative political infrastructure that researchers and civil-society monitors consider problematic for democratic norms ^[7]. These sources portray organizational expansion, recruitment, and messaging strategies that epidemiologically connect fringe ideology to party-adjacent institutions over time.

3. Scholarship finding partisan radicalization skewed toward the right

Recent academic work completed in 2025 synthesizes survey data and historical comparisons to argue that radical partisan attitudes and support for undemocratic behaviors are more prevalent among Republican identifiers, linking those trends to racialized appeals and identity-based mobilization. Books like Radical American Partisanship and Partisan Nation interpret long-term shifts in partisan psychology and institutional incentives, and both authors place emphasis on the Republican Party’s greater susceptibility to authoritarian tendencies and democratic backsliding in the current era ^{[3] [8]}. These scholarly claims align temporally with the investigative reporting cited above.

4. Democratic vulnerabilities: donor plays and protest coalitions that complicate the picture

Parallel reporting documents episodes where Democratic-associated actors intersected with extremist or foreign-linked networks, but the pattern is intermittent rather than sustained. Investigations in late 2024 and 2025 found Democratic donors strategically funding fringe or far-right candidates in some races and identified donations from board members of a Treasury-designated charity to Democratic politicians, as well as protest coalitions including Marxist or anarchist groups outside party events ^{[4] [5] [6]}. These accounts show the Democratic Party can be targeted or touched by extremist actors, but the reportage frames these as episodic and often adversarial rather than integrated into party institutions.

5. Comparing scale, integration, and longevity across the two parties

When comparing the sources, three dimensions matter: scale of influence, institutional integration, and temporal persistence. The Republican-linked reporting indicates multi-year institutional pathways—think tanks, state party structures, youth movements—through which extremist ideas and actors gained footholds ^{[1] [7] [2]}. By contrast, Democratic-linked reports show isolated donor behavior, external protest coalitions, or individual donations tied to problematic organizations without the same level of institutional embedding or long-term partywide adoption ^{[4] [5] [6]}. Scholarship further supports a higher prevalence of radical attitudes on the right during the same period ^{[3] [8]}.

6. What sources might be leaving out and potential agendas to watch

Each source has discernible perspectives and potential agendas: investigative outlets often emphasize wrongdoing to hold power to account; watchdog reports may foreground extremism risks; academic books synthesize broad trends and can prioritize theoretical explanations. That means omission risks include undercounting left-leaning extremist incidents, overstating causal links from think tanks to violence, or failing to disaggregate factional differences within each party. Readers should note that the pattern identified across sources is stronger for Republican linkages in institutional and organizational terms, while Democratic links reported are more tactical or peripheral ^{[1] [2] [4] [6] [3]}.

7. Bottom line for readers seeking a factual verdict since 2015

Across investigative reporting and scholarship through 2025, the balance of evidence attributes a more sustained and institutionally embedded association with extremist groups to elements within the Republican Party, especially at state levels and via specific conservative organizations, while Democratic associations appear more episodic and less institutionalized. The data from multiple independent lines of reporting and academic analysis converge on that conclusion, though each line of evidence carries framing choices and potential biases that readers should weigh ^{[1] [7] [2] [4] [5] [6] [3] [8]}.