Updated June 8, 2026 at 2:50 PM MDT
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In the race to the midterms this year, neither party is untouched by scandal.
Texas Senate GOP hopeful Ken Paxton has faced legal battles and criminal investigations for years, along with allegations of infidelity, a public divorce and an impeachment by the Texas House.
In Maine, Democrat Graham Platner has pushed past controversies including a report that he sent women sexually explicit messages while married and sported a tattoo of an emblem used by Nazi SS units; he says he did not know what it was when he got it and has since covered up the tattoo.
In generations past, any one of those scandals could be enough to end a campaign or career. Just ask Gary Hart, who was once seen as the frontrunner for Democrats' presidential nominee, before he dropped out after reports of an affair — or Republican Rep. Chris Lee, who resigned the same day an article was published in 2011 detailing a shirtless photograph he sent to someone on Craigslist.
"The fact politicians are more likely to survive scandals now is a condition of the world we live in," said Brandon Rottinghaus, political science professor at the University of Houston and author of Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era.
That scandals are no longer a surefire death knell for politicians is something he attributes to changing norms, hyperpolarization, partisan loyalty and deep distrust of the media.
"The strategy for politicians facing scandal these days is — dig in, blame your opponents and hold on tight," Rottinghaus said.
"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.
Partisanship prevails
Kevin Madden, a longtime Republican political strategist, was communications director to then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2005, when DeLay was facing his own scandal. DeLay was found guilty of funneling corporate money to Texas candidates; that conviction was later overturned.
"It's like — how quaint," Madden said, comparing it to the scandals du jour. "It's almost like watching the silent era of film when you think about what was considered a scandal back then."
He ascribes the change in large part to an upended media environment — recalling how there used to be a regimented and fairly uniform news diet for the public.
"Scandals had an ability to endure in that type of information landscape," he said. "If you look at the information landscape we're in now, which is hypersonic and supercharged due to digital platforms, we're in this constant, cluttered and fragmented media ecosystem."
Put another way? "If Nixon had a Fox News or a social media army of Nixon devotees to mobilize on his behalf, it could have been a much different outcome," he said.
Undergirding this is an environment where partisanship seems to outweigh almost everything.
"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."
He notes there are always exceptions to the trend. California Democrat Eric Swalwell resigned from Congress in April after backlash to allegations of sexual assault and misconduct — allegations he has denied. Texas Republican Tony Gonzales also resigned that month, in the midst of a congressional ethics investigation into his conduct and the possibility of a congressional expulsion vote over an affair with a former staffer that he admitted to.
"The moral floor is descending to a certain extent," said Eben Burnham-Snyder, former longtime Democratic aide on the Hill and in the Obama administration. "But even within that, there still is the essential question of the sin and the sinner."
But overall, he said, the political calculus has shifted.
"Increasingly the electorate is more willing to forgive as long as they can ultimately reach heaven, which is electoral victory," he said. "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."
As an example of just how much things have changed, he points to the pressure former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken faced from fellow Democrats to resign after allegations of sexual misconduct.
A little more than eight years later, some of those same senators have been much less vocal about allegations against Platner.
"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," Burnham-Snyder said.
Madden agreed.
"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. "All he did was wait it out and essentially let the news cycle wash out the scandal. And there's no doubt that many [other politicians] thought, 'if I could go back, I would.'"
The Trump factor
Rottinghaus said there's a temptation to credit the shifting scandal standards to President Trump, who forged ahead through the Access Hollywood scandal weeks before he was elected in 2016 and has continued to weather controversies throughout his two terms.
"Donald Trump didn't make scandals less important. He was just living in a world where that was true," Rottinghaus said. "He took advantage of the fact that we see this partisan schism, that we have this fragmentation in the media, and that people have very strong opinions politically about their team and about the other team. He didn't invent these things, but he did to some degree perfect them."
Trump's playbook to survive scandals — blaming opponents and not backing down — is now one that politicians routinely try to replicate.
Trump is arguably the most successful at fundraising off of his controversies as well. 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.
"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."
Sound familiar?
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 ever-unfolding controversies as a result of fighting against the establishment.
"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 does it mean if scandals matter less?
Rottinghaus argues scandals serve an important role in the political system.
"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.
Watergate exposed abuses of executive power and ultimately, Congress increased oversight, made government records more accessible and strengthened rules around campaign finance disclosure.
The Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920's led to 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."
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