Campaigns and Elections - Does Scandal Matter?

Given the results of the 2006 elections, one could wonder whether scandals actually matter for electoral outcomes. Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, who used a subcommittee chairmanship to fulfill the requests of Jack Abramoff in exchange for cash,[1] did lose his seat, but only by such a slim margin several days of vote counting were necessary to ascertain the final outcome. Other politicians with ties to Abramoff, such as Representatives John Doolittle,[2] Roy Blunt,[3] and Pete Sessions,[4] won reelection. Additionally, legislators heavily involved in the Mark Foley scandal—Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Representatives Tom Reynolds, John Shimkus, Rodney Alexander, and John Boehner—achieved reelection as well. If all these men could either almost beat their opposition or overcome it outright, one might conclude scandals impact campaigns and elections very little.

The Washington Post considers that possibility in an article a few months before the 2006 elections, noting Burns was running even with Democratic challenger John Tester in the polls despite Burns’s favors for Abramoff. Senator Charles Schumer, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, agrees in the article that scandal was not the preeminent issue for many afflicted politicians in 2006, but part of a larger tapestry of voter considerations.[5]

Scholarly research and analysis of elections in general supports Schumer’s notion scandal will not necessarily dominate elections in which it is a factor. But scandal still emerges as a significant influence on electoral outcomes, even if that might not be obvious from the 2006 campaign season.

Monica Bauer and John R. Hibbing find most incumbents who lose do so because of redistricting or scandal.[6] The Watergate scandal of the 1970’s bore an especially potent impact on elections: Forty percent of all the incumbents in the 1970’s who achieved impressive victories one year and then lost two years later, won in 1972 and lost in 1974.[7] Of course, Watergate constitutes the most serious instance of corruption in American history, having threatened the integrity of the electoral process and forced a President of the United States to resign. Influence peddling or sexual immorality scandals appear middling in comparison. The effects of Watergate, however, support the concept scandals that are serious enough can influence elections.

Research from Alan I. Abramowitz on the House of Representatives and the Senate further demonstrates the effects of scandal on electoral outcomes. Regarding the Senate, Abramowitz maintains senators at whom he looked who experienced scandals lost considerable voter support. And four of the five senators in his analysis who allegedly broke the law failed to achieve reelection.[8] As for the House, Abramowitz says of the six incumbents who lost in 1988, three had done so because of scandals.[9]

Peering more deeply into how scandal affects electoral outcomes, John G. Peters and Susan Welch examine House elections from 1968 to 1978.[10] They assess how much different kinds of scandal—“bribery, conflict of interest, campaign violations, morals charges, abuse of congressional prerogatives, crimes not covered by one of these five categories, and a residual ‘other’ category, acts not punishable as crimes but not fitting into the other categories”[11]—befall politicians and spark “electoral retribution” from voters.[12] Of the scandal categories, campaign violations rank as most frequent, comprising one-third of the scandals in the Peters and Welch study. Conflict of interest, bribery, and then “other crimes” follow with 42 percent of the scandals. Ten percent of the scandals revolved around abuse of congressional prerogatives. Morals charges and the other category take the remaining 15 percent.[13]

Peters and Welch discover electoral retribution usually ranges from 6 to 11 percent of the anticipated vote.[14] The amount varies for different types of scandal. Morals charges bring the worst losses of votes, and then bribery comes next. Electoral retribution also ensues for abuse of congressional prerogatives, “other crimes,” and campaign violations. Apparently, though, voters do not care enough about conflict of interest to exact retribution; Peters and Welch speculate voter expectation of such behavior in politicians might explain this.[15]

Incumbency advantage does not prevent electoral retribution to any degree. Seniority does not decrease the voter losses that accrue from a scandal.[16] Furthermore, politicians from both the Republican and the Democratic Parties lose votes as a consequence of scandal.[17]

How much does all this impact scandal-ridden politicians’ chances of remaining in office? Not much, the answer might seem at first glance of Peters and Welch’s data. Seventy-five percent of candidates who ran in general elections even under the cloud of scandal won. But that statistic does not account for politicians who resigned, declined to run again, or lost their primaries. Considering these eventualities, the percentage of legislators who emerged safely from scandals falls to 62.[18] If nearly half of incumbents lost their jobs somehow after a scandal, then, as Peters and Welch say, that should qualify as a serious electoral effect. (After all, if politicians thought they could win reelection after a scandal, they likely would not quit.)[19]

And any assumption scandals did not damage the campaigns of politicians who survived would not be appropriate. The amount of injury to them equaled the harm to politicians who lost or surrendered their offices. Entrenched incumbents, however, had a long time to build name recognition, accumulate money reserves, and obtain voter support via constituent service. This furnishes them with an electoral cushion that allows them to withstand even substantial losses of votes. Incumbents who received what Winston Churchill called the Order of the Boot, in contrast, either lacked the service time of the surviving incumbents or hailed from tighter districts, meaning the electoral cushion did not exist for them. So the same losses the long-term incumbents in safer districts could tolerate doomed the other incumbents.[20]

Still, after conceding that many incumbents so indeed lose their reelection bids and that survivors persevere through significant losses of support, one might yet wonder why voter abandonment is not total for any politician whom scandal afflicts. Peters and Welch posit if a scandal issue is relatively unimportant, and if a candidate possesses qualifications more important to voters than the scandal, then voters will “trade” scandal demerits for value points and back the politician, anyway. The two scholars extend their argument by contending scandals would bear less efficacy than they otherwise might in highly partisan districts and in multiple issue elections.[21]

The idea of scandal versus qualifications commerce stems from the “trading theory of corruption voting,” which Barry S. Rundquist, Gerald S. Strom, and John G. Peters advance in another study of how scandal influences electoral outcomes.[22] In this study, Rundquist and his compatriots experimented to see whether voters would discount scandal, and if so, what would persuade them to do so. The probabilities the test’s subjects would overlook scandal in different situations appear below:

As is evident, Vietnam constitutes the most important solitary “trading” criterion. The combinations of party, Vietnam, and polling information, and of party and Vietnam, place first and second, respectively, in the list of all criteria. Of significant impact as well are domestic issues and the combination of party, domestic issues, and polling information. In addition, at the other end of the spectrum, no test subject would ignore scandal absent other context into which to place candidates.[23]

What import does everything in this paper have for the 2006 elections?

First, “trading” played a role in electoral outcomes. For example, CNN exit polls for the Montana Senate race show voters who identified themselves as Republicans or conservatives overwhelmingly supported Burns. Voters who backed the War in Iraq (an analogous issue to Vietnam), who opposed withdrawing troops from Iraq, or who cited terrorism as an “extremely important” issue[24] opted for Burns, too.[25] These phenomena, whereby ideology and issues trumped corruption, would explain why Burns almost eked out a victory in the Montana Senate race.

Second, drop-offs in voter support clearly appear for many of the candidates who won despite their links to the Abramoff or Foley scandals. In the table below appear the candidates who lost votes from 2004 to 2006, as well as their percentages of vote totals in those respective years and degree of loss.

If these candidates had not been entrenched incumbents with cushions of support, they could have easily suffered defeat considering how many voters they hemorrhaged. That applies especially to Doolittle, who could have used his entire cushion this year. Doolittle might have to pray hard to win reelection in 2008, if class discussion about losing challengers coming back to achieve victory holds true.

Third, incumbents did lose their jobs because of scandal this electoral cycle. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Representative Bob Ney resigned because of their involvement with Abramoff. Senator Burns and Representatives Richard Pombo[26] and J. D. Hayworth,[27] who also dealt with Abramoff, lost their reelection campaigns. Also, as a consequence of the Foley scandal, Representative Mark Foley himself resigned. In total, the Abramoff and Foley scandals exacted five casualties. Ergo, the 2006 election season has confirmed the notion scandal does eliminate many incumbents.

The upshot of all this is, even though voter trading and electoral cushions protect incumbents against the effects of scandal, it still significantly influences electoral outcomes.