Royce White, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Minnesota endorsed by the state GOP and beloved in right-wing internet circles, missed at least a half-dozen court-mandated child support payments between 2020 and 2023, court records show. According to NBC News, White was twice found in contempt of court, and threatened by one judge with a 180-day jail sentence if he didn't pay up.
White, who has accused the family court system of being unfair to men, claimed that he is current on his child support obligations "as of today."
"My arrear just stems from a time when I was court-ordered to pay child support and back child support on an NBA salary," he said in an interview with NBC News. "That's how I got behind. And the interest rates are so high that if I pay child support every month on time, the interest is the exact same price."
The child support revelations might cause some buyers' remorse among the Minnesota Republican Party delegates who voted to endorse him this month by a two-thirds majority. White, a former NBA player with nine minutes of on-court experience, has won over some conservatives with his recent hard-right turn towards incendiary and profanity-laced online commentary and adamant support for former President Donald Trump (in 2020, he had expressed support for Black Lives Matter). But, so far, he has only raised a paltry sum for his campaign. And it is unclear whether or not Republican voters will consider White's legal troubles and their effect on his viability as a candidate when they choose between several candidates in the August primary.
Steve Daines, the Montana senator who runs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has remained mum on endorsing White if he becomes the nominee. "I don't think he could win a general election," he recently told reporters. He would likely prefer to see retired Navy commander and business executive Joe Fraser in the general election, whom an NRSC spokesperson described as "a political outsider and American hero."
Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP, said Republican delegates "overlooked" White's debts and that he was not "properly vetted."
He is "the most unqualified, ill-prepared candidate that’s ever been endorsed in modern time by a major political party in this state," Brodkorb asserted.
Right-wing media provocateur and former Trump official Steve Bannon, who has cultivated White as a political ally, claimed that though White is a "very flawed instrument," many similar MAGA-aligned candidates "have done pretty well."
If Royce loses the primary, it will be his second failed attempt at winning a GOP nomination; in 2022, he fell short in the Republican primary in Ilhan Omar's House district, which is far away from the Miami strip club where his campaign reportedly spent some of its money. If he wins, he faces an uphill battle against three-term incumbent Democrat Amy Klobuchar, who has won by double-digits in all her statewide elections.
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