Scandals no – Texas Senate hopeful Ken Paxton and Maine Democrat Graham Platner are both drawing scrutiny tied to personal and legal controversies, illustrating how scandal—once a reliable career-ending trigger—has become survivable in today’s hyperpolarized political ecosy
For generations. political scandals had a way of ending the story fast—sometimes with a single headline and the next day’s silence. Now. as Texas Senate GOP hopeful Ken Paxton and Maine Democrat Graham Platner push through their own controversies. the pattern is harder to miss: public outrage doesn’t always translate into political collapse.
Paxton’s campaign is playing out amid legal battles and criminal investigations that have stretched on for years. along with allegations of infidelity. a public divorce. and impeachment by the Texas House. In Maine. Platner has faced his own controversies. including a report that he sent women sexually explicit messages while married and wore a tattoo of an emblem used by Nazi SS units. Platner has said he did not know what it was when he got it and has since covered up the tattoo.
This change in momentum has long outlived the usual shockwaves that once followed revelations about affairs or personal misconduct. The history still sits in the public record as a reminder of how different the era used to be: former Democratic presidential front-runner Gary Hart dropped out in 1988 after reports of an affair. returned to the race. then withdrew a second time. In 2011, Republican Rep. Chris Lee resigned the same day an article was published detailing a shirtless photograph he sent to someone on Craigslist.
Brandon Rottinghaus. a political science professor at the University of Houston and author of Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era. argues the difference isn’t just about the individual allegations—it’s about the world they land in. “The fact politicians are more likely to survive scandals now is a condition of the world we live in. ” he said. Rottinghaus links that shift to changing norms, hyperpolarization, partisan loyalty, and deep distrust of the media.
In his view. the survival playbook is increasingly familiar: “The strategy for politicians facing scandal these days is — dig in. blame your opponents and hold on tight.” He says the approach works because it leverages distrust of both institutions and journalists. “The reason this works is because it leverages distrust of media and politicians. which allows for politicians to survive in ways they couldn’t in the past because those elements weren’t present. ” he said.
Kevin Madden. a longtime Republican political strategist who served as communications director to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2005. when DeLay was facing his own scandal. describes the new landscape as both louder and more fragmented. DeLay was found guilty of funneling corporate money to Texas candidates; that conviction was later overturned. Madden compared the modern cycle to what he called a “silent era” of politics. calling it “like — how quaint.” He said the current scandal environment feels like it has become something viewers digest without the same gatekeeping that once constrained it.
Madden points to the upended media environment. He recalled how. in the past. the public had a more “regimented and fairly uniform news diet. ” with scandals able to endure in a concentrated information landscape. Today. he says. the ecosystem is “hypersonic and supercharged due to digital platforms. ” leaving the public in “a constant. cluttered and fragmented media ecosystem.” He also argued that if a figure like Nixon had faced today’s media machinery—“a Fox News or a social media army of Nixon devotees to mobilize on his behalf”—the outcome could have been different.
At the center of that fragmentation is a kind of partisan sorting that can change what the facts mean. “These scandals become a political inkblot,” Madden said. “If you’re on the left, you see it through the lens of somebody on the left. If you’re on the right, you see it through the lens of somebody on the right. And that’s where you decide whether it’s something to either be outraged about or something you want to defend or dismiss.”.
Still, there have been exceptions. Eben Burnham-Snyder. a former longtime Democratic aide on the Hill and in the Obama administration. described the moral and political stakes as uneven but not vanished. “The moral floor is descending to a certain extent. ” he said. adding that there remains “the essential question of the sin and the sinner.”.
He also argued that political incentives are now shaped differently. “Increasingly the electorate is more willing to forgive as long as they can ultimately reach heaven. which is electoral victory. ” he said. Burnham-Snyder pointed to an emerging calculation inside parties after earlier handling of scandals. “I think after a lot of missteps by Democrats in how they handled certain scandals. what they’ve decided is the cost of enforcing norms is higher than the cost of winning with a flawed candidate.”.
That shift is visible in the contrast between enforcement in earlier years and the current tolerance shown toward Platner’s controversies. Burnham-Snyder said that if Democrats could “go back in time,” the answer would be yes that they would act differently. “If Democrats could go back in time, would they act differently?. And I think what you’re seeing play out with Platner is yes — the answer to that is yes,” he said. He also referenced how Democratic senators once faced pressure to resign after misconduct allegations against former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken. A little more than eight years later, Burnham-Snyder said, some senators have been less vocal about allegations involving Platner.
Madden offered a similar retrospective. “There’s no doubt that somewhere Andrew Cuomo and Al Franken are sitting there and watching what happened to the governor of Virginia. for example. ” he said. referencing former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. who refused calls to resign after a photo surfaced from his medical school yearbook depicting someone in blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Madden said Northam “just wait[ed] it out” and let “the news cycle wash out the scandal. ” and he suggested that other politicians took that lesson back with them.
One major figure looms over the discussion: President Trump. Rottinghaus said there is a temptation to treat the changing scandal standards as an artifact of Trump alone. but he argues the president didn’t lower the importance of scandals so much as he thrived in the existing partisan fight. “Donald Trump didn’t make scandals less important. He was just living in a world where that was true,” Rottinghaus said. He described how Trump capitalized on the partisan schism and media fragmentation, taking those conditions and “perfect[ing] them.”.
Rottinghaus also pointed to the political utility of scandal itself. Trump’s approach to survival included blaming opponents and not backing down. Rottinghaus said Trump has been especially effective at fundraising off controversy. He and the GOP raised nearly $53 million in the first day after Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a criminal hush money trial.
That fundraising strategy feeds into a broader pattern: turning scandal into a kind of badge. “Politicians can use scandals as a badge of honor to say that they’ve been in the fight. and the reason that they’ve been caught in the scandal is that they’ve been fighting for the people. for their base. ” Rottinghaus said. “A lot of politicians will simply frame a scandal as a partisan attack or as misinformation or as a witch hunt.”.
Paxton and Platner have already adopted versions of that framing. In Texas. Paxton described his impeachment as a “politically motivated sham” and has framed his Senate race as a fight against the media and political establishment. In an interview with Maine Public Radio, Platner cast his controversies as the cost of challenging power. “We knew that the machine itself … the whole political pundit class combined with the political establishment itself was going to fight us tooth and nail. because what we are building here is something substantial. ” Platner said.
What happens when scandal matters less?. Rottinghaus argues there is real damage in that tradeoff. “There’s a lot of evidence that if you weaken the power of scandals. you reduce the institutional accountability that we need in democracy to make it function properly. ” he said. His examples run through American political history: Watergate exposed abuses of executive power and ultimately led Congress to increase oversight. make government records more accessible. and strengthen rules around campaign finance disclosure. The Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920’s helped drive stricter congressional oversight of federal leasing. The Pentagon Papers scandal helped lead Congress to pass the War Powers Resolution.
“Scandal is like a canary in the coal mine. They tell us there’s something wrong with a politician, with a rule, with a system. Those are things we can fix,” Rottinghaus said. “Now, the canaries have flown away and the cage is open.”
Ken Paxton Graham Platner U.S. Senate races Texas politics Maine politics political scandal campaign survival media distrust hyperpolarization impeachment Nazi SS tattoo emblem criminal investigations Gary Hart Chris Lee Brandon Rottinghaus Tom DeLay Ralph Northam Al Franken Donald Trump