HIS campaign, said one media critic, has been ‘vanilla”. Robert Trim is running for Georgia’s House of Representatives, in the liberal-leaning suburbs of Atlanta.

So the Republican is tacking to America’s political centre, talking about bread-and-butter conservative issues: school standards, tax cuts, law and order.

He might win. The seat – House District 35 – is, in the jargon of pundits, “contestable”. It should not be. Why? Because Mr Trim is a liar.

When I use the unparliamentary L word I do not mean some run-of-the-mill political spinner.

The wannabe state representative has a criminal conviction for giving false statements to the police about an opponent.

It’s quite the story, one that I think is worth re-telling.

Because it illustrates a by-product of the kind of hyper-partisan political culture we now share with the United States: the truly terrible candidate.

So, please, buckle up.

Less than a decade ago Mr Trim worked as a consultant to a Tea Party cultural warrior who was waging a “jihad” against the local education system.

Cue some heated meetings of a school board. One got so hot somebody called the police.

Afterwards Mr Trim told officers he had to push his client – now, as it happens, his wife – out of the way of a car being driven at her as she left the showdown. The vehicle, he said, was the same make and model as that of her foe, the local schools superintendent.

This was a very serious allegation. But it fell completely apart when cops got hold of CCTV. Investigators – having seen what really happened – asked the Republican to re-enact what he claimed had taken place at the scene. And then booked him.

Mr Trim, his client/wife and another “witness” were each given 60 days in the clink. The candidate tells his own version of the crime – which was downgraded from a felony to misdemeanour on appeal – but the conviction is not in doubt.

“He lied so maliciously that he could have sent an innocent man to prison,” wrote an indigent columnist, Bill Torpy, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And possibly for a long stretch.”

The Republican Party thought Mr Trim was fit to stand. Come next month there will be conservatives who will go out and vote for the man. As long as he is running on their ticket.

This is shocking but not surprising. Because overly tribalistic politics – wherever it happens – can throw up some truly inadequate and inappropriate candidates. And not just in America.

Sorry, I am going to labour an unoriginal point. We all know that we have problems with what politologists coyly refer to as “candidate quality” in the UK.

And it goes all the way to the top.

I still struggle with the reality that Boris Johnson – given his long and well-documented track record of personal dishonesty – was even vetted to be be a Westminster candidate. Yet, amid the great wedge issue of Brexit, somehow the guy got to No 10.

Former Tory MSP Adam Tomkins, on these very pages, this week called his one-time leader a “serial liar”. Mr Johnson’s blink-and-you-would-have-missed-her replacement, he added, was a “deranged ideologue”. Yikes.

The bar is now so low on character that the Tories have anointed Rishi Sunak as PM. This is a man who, while Chancellor, breached his government’s Covid laws and benefitted from his millionaire wife’s ethically dodgy tax arrangements. But he is seen – so far, not without reason – as an improvement.

Sub-standard politicians are not just a problem for Conservatives, or their populist wings, on either side of the Atlantic.

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, hyper-partisans of all hues have a remarkable gift for finding fault with their opponents’ candidates – but not their own. And this has been true in Scotland.

There is some good news. Scandals do still end political careers here. And I like to think most of our politicians – even the shallowest Twitter-grade tribalists – are not actual sociopaths.

But we have had, for example, an entire roll-call of SNP elected members named in sexual conduct scandals. These kind of behaviours are not always going to show up in vetting, of course. But sometimes they do. There were revelations this summer that the party was told that one of its council candidates, Jordan Linden, was “not fit” to represent it. He resigned in disgrace just two months after being elected leader of North Lanarkshire Council.

Parties are absolutely right to highlight bad ’uns put up by their opponents. That is their job. I just wish they were just as hard on their own.

We need to challenge the political culture that enables terrible people to stand. And we need to ask ourselves hard questions about why we vote for them when they do.

That is one of the many reasons why this year’s US Mid Terms are quite so interesting. They are like the ultimate test of just how bad candidates can be and still stand, and still win. We will find out in a few weeks.

Mr Trim is not the only bafflingly unsuitable person seeking office in Georgia. There is another Republican running for the US Senate who has really got American tongues wagging.

He is some guy, Herschel Walker. For more than a decade the strikingly inarticulate but genuinely popular running back was an NFL superstar.

But his campaign is a dumpster fire. Not least thanks to alleged and admitted bad behaviour in his personal life. His ex-wife says he held a gun to her head and told her he would blow her brains out. (Mr Walker says he cannot remember the incident, citing a mental health condition).

As of this week two women have accused Mr Walker, who styles himself as a pro-lifer, of pressuring them to get abortions. And paying for the procedure. He denies this. Understandably: parts of his Christian Republican base would see two abortions as a double homicide.

But will he win? It’s neck-and-neck.