Scandals

New Yorkers Aren’t The Only Ones Who Really Dislike George Santos

By Geoffrey Skelley

Feb. 3, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

In one of America’s most enduring myths, President George Washington damaged his father’s cherry tree with a hatchet when he was a small child. When his father confronted him, Washington admitted to what he had done, saying “I cannot tell a lie.” 

Alas, not all Georges have followed the legendary example of our most famous founding father. Freshman Republican Rep. George Santos of New York has been in the headlines (and on the minds of pollsters) since late December, thanks to intense scrutiny over his fabrication of many parts of his background. Santos was back in the news again this week after he told fellow House Republicans that he would recuse himself from serving on his two assigned committees in the face of ongoing investigations into his personal and campaign finances. Santos’s recusal comes as poll after poll suggests he is an unusually toxic figure — both in his district and more broadly. 

Let’s start with the feelings of voters in New York’s 3rd District, Santos’s Long Island-based seat. Two January surveys found that a majority of the voters want him to resign the seat they just elected him to in November. First, Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling surveyed the district in early January on behalf of Unrig Our Economy and found that 60 percent of voters thought Santos should leave office. Then earlier this week, a poll from nonpartisan outfit Siena College on behalf of Newsday found that 78 percent of registered voters in the district wanted Santos to resign. Few polls have ever found such a large share of constituent support for the resignation of a scandalized politician. The Washington Post only found one poll that outdistanced the 78 percent calling for Santos’s resignation: An Ipsos/McClatchy survey from December 2008 that found 95 percent of Illinois adults supported the resignation of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whom the Illinois legislature impeached and removed from office the following month.

Santos has said he won’t resign, but polling from his district suggests he’s losing support even among voters from his own party. The earlier poll from PPP found that 38 percent of Republican voters thought Santos should resign. But in the more recent survey from Siena College, 71 percent of Republican voters said the same.

We must be cautious about deciphering trends from two surveys conducted by different pollsters, but it makes sense that more Republicans (and voters overall) now want Santos to resign. The PPP survey predated a Jan. 11 news conference in which Nassau County GOP officials called for Santos to resign, a clear illustration of intraparty opposition to the freshman congressman. And additional scandals involving Santos have surfaced since that presser, including records indicating that Santos’s mother wasn’t in New York on Sept. 11, 2001 — contrary to Santos’s claim that she’d been at the World Trade Center when terrorists attacked.

Santos’s announcement that he wouldn’t serve on his committees followed a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who must consider how Santos’s myriad problems could affect the House GOP’s image. It’s especially easy to imagine McCarthy wanting Santos to decline his committee assignments in the context of McCarthy’s ongoing efforts to block Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from taking their committee posts — none of whom face criminal charges, unlike Santos. (Republicans removed Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday afternoon.) After all, 40 percent of Americans told YouGov/The Economist in mid-January that Santos should be denied a committee post, the largest percentage among the six representatives the survey asked about.¹ And while a large share of respondents were unsure about whether to block representatives’ committee assignment, Santos was the only one of the six whom both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to say shouldn’t be able to serve on a committee than should.

Beyond the committee issue, though, there’s no doubt that Santos’s myriad problems are gaining public notice — and that Santos is unpopular everywhere, not just in his district. In mid-January, about 3 in 5 registered voters across New York state told Siena College that Santos should resign, and majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents held an unfavorable view of him. And Santos’s infamy has made him unusually well-known nationally (as well as unpopular) for a House member who’s only served a month in office. In a YouGov/The Economist survey released last week, 52 percent of Americans held an unfavorable opinion of Santos, compared with only 14 percent who had a favorable opinion, far worse numbers than those for a divisive figure like Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in recent YouGov/The Economist polling.

It’s impossible to know if the intensely negative views of Santos will eventually precipitate his resignation. Only a two-thirds vote of the House can force him to exit, unless he decides on his own to resign. Given the GOP’s narrow House majority, such a vote is unlikely to happen anytime soon, especially considering Santos occupies a swing seat that Democrats could win in a special election. But the more the public has learned about Santos, the worse his numbers have become. And for better or worse, Santos’s decision to decline his committee assignments will almost certainly not be the last time we hear about him in 2023.

Other polling bites

• Pew Research Center recently found that Democrats are more open to compromise between President Biden and the GOP-led House. Overall, 58 percent of Democrats² wanted Biden to work with Republican congressional leaders, even if some of the outcomes disappoint Democrats, while 41 percent preferred Biden to stand up to the GOP, even if that created conflict. By comparison, 64 percent of Republicans³ wanted GOP leaders to stand up to Biden, while only 34 percent preferred they work with the president. This isn’t a new pattern, as voters from the party in the White House seem likelier to prefer compromise: Back in 2018, Pew found more Republicans wanted former President Donald Trump to work with Democrats in Congress than not, while more Democrats preferred their congressional leaders stand up to Trump.
• Biden seems increasingly likely to seek a second term as president, and a new poll of Black voters from HIT Strategies found 59 percent backed such a bid. Black voters 50 years or older were more likely to support a Biden reelection campaign (66 percent), though a majority of those under 50 (55 percent) also preferred Biden run again. Black support proved critical for Biden in winning the 2020 Democratic nomination race, and he has pushed for South Carolina, with its majority Black primary electorate, to become the lead-off state in the 2024 Democratic primary.
• Monmouth University took a look at Americans’ attitudes toward current and former U.S. officials’ possession of classified documents, a group that includes Biden, Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. Overall, 80 percent of Americans thought Trump knew he had classified documents in his possession, whereas 58 percent believed Biden knew and 50 percent thought Pence knew. But only about 2 in 5 Americans said the documents in Trump or Biden’s homes would pose a threat to national security (1 in 5 said this of Pence’s documents). Democrats were far more likely to believe the documents in Trump’s possession would endanger national security, while Republicans were much more inclined to say the same of the files in Biden’s home.
• Life satisfaction among Americans remained relatively low at the start of 2023, according to Gallup. Across seven different aspects of U.S. society ranging from the moral and ethical climate to the size and influence of major corporations, an average of 41 percent expressed satisfaction with how things were going. This matched the 2022 average and only slightly exceeded the record low of 39 percent in 2021, the first result in this data set during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Gallup has regularly polled this question in January since 2001.) The average had since 2011 hovered around 50 percent, and had always exceeded 50 percent before the 2008 financial crisis.
• In another January poll, Pew found that a slight majority of Americans remains supportive of providing assistance to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, but an increasing share thinks the U.S. is giving Ukraine too much support. Overall, 31 percent said the U.S. was providing the right amount of support and 20 percent said not enough. But 26 percent said the U.S. was providing too much assistance to Ukraine, an uptick from 20 percent who said the same in September. A plurality of Republicans (40 percent) said the U.S. was giving Ukraine too much support, while a plurality of Democrats (40 percent) said the U.S. was providing the right amount of assistance.
• A new poll from Normington Petts on behalf of Progress Arizona, LUCHA and Replace Sinema PAC suggests independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will face an uphill climb if she seeks reelection in 2024. In one hypothetical matchup, Sinema earned 24 percent of the vote but trailed both Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake, who each attracted 36 percent. In another test, Sinema received 27 percent, but trailed Gallego (37 percent) and former GOP Gov. Doug Ducey (31 percent). Although the poll’s sponsors oppose Sinema, she performed better in this survey than in two previous polls of the Arizona race, which each put her support in the mid-teens in a theoretical three-way contest.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,⁴ 41.9 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.9 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.0 points). At this time last week, 42.0 percent approved and 52.4 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -10.4 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 43.3 percent and a disapproval rating of 51.3 percent, for a net approval rating of -8.0 points.

Congress

3 Questions We Have About George Santos

By Nathaniel Rakich

Jan. 5, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Before the revelations, George Santos was the type of fresh face the Republican Party would have put front and center. The representative-elect is Latino, openly gay and just 34 years old. And by winning the election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District last year, he appeared to have cracked the code to succeeding as a Republican on Democratic-leaning turf.

But now, Republicans seem to want nothing to do with Santos. Last month, the world learned that he fabricated much of his biography and may have broken U.S. and Brazilian law. Santos now admits that he did not graduate from college, never worked at Citigroup or Goldman Sachs, does not own 13 properties and is not Jewish. In addition, he is still in arrears for unpaid rent from several years ago, did not fully disclose the source of his income on his personal financial disclosure forms and was accused of check fraud as a 19-year-old in Brazil.

All these questions about Santos’s past have begotten other questions — about his place in Congress and political future. Here’s our best shot at answering three of them.

Would Santos have won if voters had known the truth?

Many people believe Santos was elected under false pretenses. Some parts of his résumé were disputed before the election by the North Shore Leader and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But the story only got widespread attention when The New York Times blew the lid off it in December. 

Still, it’s unclear whether he would have lost if his lies had been exposed earlier. We know that, theoretically, the district has enough Democratic voters to have defeated Santos. According to Daily Kos Elections, President Biden carried New York’s 3rd District⁵ in 2020 by 8.2 percentage points. But many of those voters were nowhere to be found in 2022. 

It turns out, Santos didn’t do unusually well for a Republican in the district. The district voted red up and down the ballot. According to data from Democratic strategist Benjamin Rosenblatt and the New York City Board of Elections, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin carried the 3rd District by 12 points.⁶ And Republican Senate candidate Joe Pinion carried the district by 4 points.⁷ And Pinion’s margin within the district represents a scenario where the Republican candidate was much weaker than the Democratic candidate: Pinion raised a pitiful $589,000 for the race, while his opponent, powerful Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, raised $41.8 million. Of course, Pinion didn’t have Santos’s allegations swirling around him.

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver previously calculated that scandals, on average, shave 9 points off sitting House members’ margins in general elections and 13 points in competitive districts. Santos’s winning margin in 2022 was just 7.5 points.⁸ But a scandal’s impact varies quite a bit from election to election. So we can’t just subtract 9 points from that margin and assume that would have been the result if voters had been aware of his deceptions. Historically, some scandal-plagued candidates have underperformed by more than 30 points, while others have actually done better than expected. What’s more, in this era of high partisan polarization, scandals may hurt candidates less than they used to.

Will Santos resign?

Of course, the reality is that Santos was elected and took his seat in the House this week. Many people have called on him to resign, but historical trends suggest he may try to ride the scandal out.

I maintain a database of political scandals and their impacts on politicians’ careers. Since 2017, 87 federal and statewide office-holders have been credibly accused of illegal or unethical activity, and only 17 have resigned.⁹ Another two were removed from office, though this probably won’t happen to Santos: It takes a two-thirds vote of the House to expel a representative, and it’s unlikely that dozens of Republicans will vote to potentially shrink their already-narrow majority.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-shape-republicans-politics-2023-fivethirtyeight-95905408

That doesn’t necessarily mean Santos will get off scot-free. Another nine of these scandal-plagued candidates chose not to run again,¹⁰ and another 23 of them lost reelection or failed in a bid for higher office. Santos has reportedly told local Republican leaders that he will not seek reelection. But if he were to run again, Santos would face a brutal reelection campaign in 2024 in his Biden-voting district.

Some scandals are more severe than others and may be more likely to lead to dire consequences for a person’s political career. But let’s look at politicians in situations similar to Santos’s. At least three other sitting or aspiring U.S. House members have been accused of embellishing their résumé in recent years.¹¹ First, former Rep. Steve Watkins claimed to have founded a company he merely worked for and was accused of voter fraud and making unwanted sexual advances. He lost reelection. Former Rep. John Ratcliffe falsely claimed he prosecuted a terrorist case as a U.S. attorney. As a result, he had to initially withdraw from consideration to be director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump. But Trump nominated him again and he won Senate confirmation. And then there’s Sara Jacobs, who said she was a State Department “policymaker” even though she was a contractor who did not make actual policy. She won her election and is still in Congress today. 

Who would win a special election to replace Santos?

If Santos does resign (or is expelled), a special election would be held in New York’s 3rd District to choose a successor. Under New York law, the governor must announce the date of the special election within 10 days of the vacancy, and the election itself would be between 70 and 80 days after that. So if Santos were to resign today, the special election would be in late March or early April.

Ahead of the 2022 election, New York’s 3rd District had a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean¹² of D+4. That means, in a theoretically neutral political environment where the nation is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, we would expect Democrats to win the seat by 4 points. But of course, D+4 is still highly competitive, and it wouldn’t take much for Republicans to win. (Just ask Santos himself — or Zeldin, or Pinion.) In November, the national political environment leaned Republican by about 2 points,¹³ and it may shift toward Republicans or Democrats by the time a special election is held.

In addition, Republicans or Democrats could overperform by running a strong campaign, which could come down to the quality of the nominees. Unlike some other states, New York doesn’t hold primaries for special elections; instead, leaders in each party will choose their nominees. That means each candidate will probably be a party insider — someone unlikely to have the same baggage as Santos or the other flawed candidates Republicans nominated in the 2022 midterms. That could lead to a highly competitive, tooth-and-nail fight where neither party begins with the advantage. Of course, if Santos does resign, we’ll have much more to say about the special election once we know when it will be and who is running.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/buy-young-voters-turned-democrats-midterms-96048055

With less than a month before the midterm elections, we’re tackling some of the most common questions about how last-minute polling and political shifts could affect the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast.

In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke break down why there is a gap between many states’ Senate and governor forecasts and which states they actually consider purple. They also answer some listener questions on how the model factors in undecided voters and how they personally would rate Senate candidates with similar odds.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia who has campaigned on being anti-abortion, paid for his then-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009. Walker has denied the allegation. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how the scandals surrounding Walker have evolved over the course of his Senate campaign and how this could affect the outcome of the race.

They break down how candidate misconduct is generally factored into the FiveThirtyEight model and if this newest allegation will even be considered a scandal by the model’s standards.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2022 Election

Will Herschel Walker's Abortion Controversy Hurt His Chances In Georgia?

By Nathaniel Rakich

Oct. 4, 2022, at 4:25 PM

On Monday night, The Daily Beast reported that Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia who has said he wants to ban abortion in all circumstances, had paid for his pregnant then-girlfriend to get an abortion in 2009.

Walker is currently locked in a toss-up race with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock for a seat that could decide control of the Senate. According to FiveThirtyEight’s midterm forecast, Georgia is the most likely “tipping-point” state in the chamber — i.e., the state most likely to give Republicans or Democrats their majority. To give you a sense of how crucial it is: If Republicans win Georgia, we estimate they would have a 60-in-100 chance of winning the Senate. But if Democrats win the state, we estimate they’d have an 89-in-100 chance of winning the chamber.

The question is, how much will this controversy hurt Walker? Given the salaciousness of the story and the turmoil it has reportedly plunged his campaign into, it’s tempting to think it might torpedo his chances. But that’s hardly a guarantee.

It is true that scandals tangibly affect candidates’ chances of winning elections. I keep a database of scandals, and based on an analysis we did in 2018, we found that scandal-plagued incumbents did 9 percentage points worse in their next general election than they would otherwise be projected to do. That analysis included a variety of factors such as the candidate’s previous margin of victory, the partisan lean of their district, generic-ballot polling, congressional approval ratings and the incumbent’s congressional voting record. This finding led us to include whether or not a candidate faces a scandal as a variable in our midterm forecast.

But this new revelation about Walker, who has denied the allegation, hasn’t affected our forecast of the Georgia Senate race — at least not yet. That’s because, for one, it doesn’t meet our definition of a scandal. As our forecast defines it, a scandal is a credible accusation of objective criminal or ethical wrongdoing. While Walker’s decision to pay for an abortion may have been hypocritical, it wasn’t illegal. And if being hypocritical were enough to qualify as “scandal-tarred,” most politicians would be slapped with the label!

Moreover, Walker has already been tagged with the scandal variable. Before and during his campaign, multiple previous scandals that meet our definition have come out. Walker’s ex-wife accused him of threatening to kill her and was granted a protective order against him in 2005. He and a business partner were sued after failing to repay $625,000 in loans. Democrats have accused him of multiple campaign-finance violations. And in June, The Daily Beast reported that Walker had fathered three children he had not previously publicly acknowledged.

But right now, the scandal variable barely impacts our forecast. Only 6 percent of the Deluxe forecast for Georgia Senate is based on the “fundamentals,” which include variables like scandals, Georgia’s partisan lean, Warnock’s incumbency and candidate fundraising. That’s because Georgia is a very heavily polled state. And because we have so many polls and it is relatively close to Election Day, almost 60 percent of the forecast is based on survey data.

And, of course, because this story is so recent, none of these polls account for Walker’s abortion controversy. The bad press Walker is receiving may very well damage his standing with voters. The story has already spurred Walker’s adult son Christian, a conservative social-media celebrity, to post critical tweets and videos about the candidate (including one in which he accused Walker of “threatening to kill us”), which could keep Walker’s unsavory personal life in the news. And he doesn’t need to drop 9 points in the polls for this all to have an impact: According to our polling average of the race, Warnock is currently polling 2 points ahead of Walker, so even if the controversy doesn’t hurt Walker, if it prevents him from gaining, that’s a problem for the Republican.

But on the other hand, there might not be many voters left to turn on Walker. Democrats have been airing ads for weeks reminding voters of Walker’s past scandals. And Georgia is also a highly inelastic state, meaning it doesn’t have a lot of swing voters. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has also said it will continue campaigning hard in Georgia. Many Republican and Republican-leaning voters in Georgia may feel that too much is at stake (i.e., control of the Senate) for this latest allegation to sway their vote. And, as we wrote in 2018, partisanship often trumps scandal.

As always, we’ll need to wait and see to know for sure how public opinion will change in response to this story. You can bet that we’ll keep an extra close eye on Georgia polling for the next few weeks.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/voting-rights-north-carolina-hinge-supreme-court-election-91401195

Just last week he denied the report’s charges and said that he wouldn’t resign. But with most Democrats, including President Biden, calling for his resignation, an impending impeachment investigation in the state legislature and public opinion now solidly against him, it all became too much for Cuomo. On Tuesday, he announced his resignation, effective Aug. 24.

When the allegations of sexual harassment first broke earlier this year, one of Cuomo’s political saving graces was that public opinion hadn’t turned against him. But in the aftermath of the report’s release, that quickly changed. Polls found that anywhere from 60 to 70 percent of New Yorkers thought Cuomo should resign or that the state legislature should start impeachment proceedings if he didn’t resign, including a majority of Democrats. With such strong opposition within his own party, Cuomo had few options available to him. He had reportedly tried to reach a backroom deal whereby he wouldn’t seek reelection in exchange for avoiding impeachment, but that clearly doesn’t seem to have been an option. The state legislature had been in the process of moving ahead with impeachment proceedings.

Some politicians have survived scandals, but as my colleague Nathaniel Rakich has previously noted, politicians faced with charges of sexual harassment have been forced out at a higher rate after the #MeToo movement in 2017, when claims of sexual harassment and misconduct in the work place have been taken more seriously.

Cuomo posed a serious liability to his own party. Sexual harassment is something that Americans, especially Democrats, view as a significant problem. In 2019, 80 percent of Democrats told Gallup that they thought sexual harassment was a major problem, while 62 percent of Americans overall thought the same. 

But it was also easier for Democrats to push for Cuomo’s resignation because his successor, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, wasn’t herself mired in scandal, and as a Democrat, she would also keep the party in charge of the state. By comparison, one big reason the Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, didn’t resign following his blackface scandal in 2019 was that his immediate successors, both Democrats, all had their own problems: the lieutenant governor faced multiple sexual assault allegations and the attorney general had his own blackface scandal. Had Democrats pushed for all three to step down, the governorship might have ended up in Republican hands. 

Hochul makes history now as the first woman governor of New York, but given she only has 15 months left to serve in Cuomo’s term, this also puts the 2022 New York gubernatorial election under a cloud of uncertainty as Cuomo — especially prior to the allegations — was expected to mount a bid for a fourth term. 

If Hochul runs, the fact that she is an unelected incumbent could make for an interesting electoral dynamic. Right now, she’s not terribly well known — about half of New York’s registered voters in a recent Quinnipiac University poll said they didn’t have an opinion of her job performance. That gives Hochul an opening to make an impression with voters, but she doesn’t have much time. The 2022 campaign is already underway, and even though unelected gubernatorial incumbents who run for a full term have tended to win their party’s nomination, they also are more vulnerable to a primary challenge than elected incumbents. And in a blue state like New York, there are a number of high-profile Democrats who might throw their hat in the ring. That said, it’s early yet, and we still don’t even know if Hochul will run. But for now, we’re keeping an eye on what New Yorkers think of Hochul and what that means for the race for the governor’s mansion in 2022.

Back in March, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s political future hung in limbo.

Several women had come forward with detailed allegations of sexual harassment against Cuomo, and in light of these allegations, there was a growing consensus among Democratic lawmakers that Cuomo should resign. (Both of New York’s U.S. senators, at least 20 of its 27 U.S. representatives, at least 45 of its 63 state senators and at least 55 of its 150 assembly members had all called on Cuomo to resign from office.)

But some Democrats — most prominently President Biden — said they would withhold judgment until state Attorney General Letitia James conducted an independent investigation into the allegations. And after months passed with no news about the scandal, even some politicians who had condemned Cuomo seemed to have moved on.

That changed on Tuesday when James released a report concluding that Cuomo violated state and federal law by sexually harassing 11 women, in addition to retaliating against the first woman who publicly accused him and creating a hostile work environment for women. In a video statement later in the day, Cuomo denied making inappropriate sexual advances, but this did not stop several lawmakers from renewing their calls for him to step down. Indeed, he is now under more pressure to resign than ever, as some new names, including Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have joined the chorus as well. [Editor’s note: After publication, Biden said Cuomo should resign, as did Pelosi.]

The political consensus around calls for Cuomo’s resignation reflects just how much Americans’ attitudes about the seriousness of sexual harassment have changed — especially among Democrats. In 1998, Gallup found that 50 percent of Americans thought that sexual harassment was a major problem; by 2019, that number had risen to 62 percent. And among Democrats that number had risen even higher: 80 percent said sexual harassment was a major problem. Those kinds of numbers make it very difficult for any Democratic politician to stand by Cuomo and explain why even some of his closest allies have now broken with him.

So will Cuomo heed his colleagues’ calls for him to resign? A lot could depend on whether public opinion turns against him as a result of this report. The last poll before James’s report, conducted June 22-29 by Siena College, found that, while New York registered voters were divided in their opinion of Cuomo (45 percent had a favorable view of him, while 47 percent had an unfavorable view), only 23 percent wanted him to resign immediately. And that wasn’t just because New Yorkers had moved on from or forgotten about the allegations; even in early March, in the immediate aftermath of the allegations, New York registered voters told Siena 50 percent to 35 percent that they did not think he should resign. 

On Wednesday morning, however, Marist College released the first poll conducted since James’s report, and it found that 59 percent of New Yorkers wanted Cuomo to resign — and if he doesn’t resign, the same share thinks the state legislature should impeach him. This is just one poll, but it could suggest that many New Yorkers have found the report’s findings disturbing enough to change their mind. Then again, in the June Siena survey, a plurality (42 percent) of voters thought James’s investigation would uncover evidence that Cuomo committed sexual harassment — and yet only 23 percent wanted him to resign.

At this point, Cuomo seems as if he will try to hold onto power as long as he feels he still has a public mandate. He may reason that resignation would forever tarnish his political legacy, whereas if he serves out his term, the scandal may fade into the background — as it did from March through July, and as Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal did (in fact, Northam’s popularity has fully recovered). Cuomo may even still be entertaining thoughts of running for reelection. He has a whopping $18.5 million in his campaign war chest, and New Yorkers still approve of many aspects of his governorship, including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic (despite his administration’s alleged cover-up of thousands of COVID-19-related deaths at New York nursing homes).

But Cuomo’s fate also may not be fully in his own hands. Back in March, Democratic legislators raised the possibility of impeaching Cuomo for his misdeeds, and several reiterated their support for impeachment on Tuesday. According to state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, James’s report has been referred to the Assembly committee in charge of impeachment, which Newsday reports will meet on Monday. Clearly, this is a fast-moving story, and Cuomo’s future is still very much up in the air.

[How Do We Get Back To Normal Fastest? Prioritize Access To The Vaccine.]

Separately, between Feb. 24 and March 8, five women, including four former aides, have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment or uncomfortable romantic overtures, such as unwanted kissing or asking them about their sex lives. Although his office has denied some of the allegations, Cuomo apologized last week for making the women feel uncomfortable and said it was unintentional. He also agreed to let the attorney general lead an independent investigation of the claims.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/white-house-economists-thinking-covid-19-relief-fivethirtyeight-76157114

The twin scandals have taken a toll on Cuomo’s once-high approval ratings and have even led to an increasing number of calls for his resignation. But so far, Cuomo is insisting he’ll stay put, and in many ways he still remains a formidable candidate for reelection in 2022, which leaves open a variety of different outcomes for Cuomo. Here are the four key ways Cuomo’s political future could unfold.

1. Cuomo resigns

Although Cuomo has insisted as recently as Sunday that he would not resign, politicians tend to deny they’re resigning right up until the moment they do. If either of these scandals worsen for Cuomo — say, more women come forward, or the FBI announces criminal charges — the pressure to step down could become too great to bear. The two latest sexual-harassment allegations have already inspired the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly to call for his resignation; if other leading New York politicians, such as Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, follow suit, he may not have much of a choice.

It’s possible, though, that Cuomo can ride these allegations out. In recent years, plenty of politicians have successfully resisted calls for their resignation: By my count, since 2017, 57 federal or statewide politicians (not including Cuomo) have faced scandal while in office, and only 12 resigned. An embattled leader need look no further than Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, whose popularity has rebounded after a 2019 blackface scandal, as proof that it’s possible to wait out calls for one’s resignation and emerge with one’s career intact.

That said, I did find that officeholders accused of unwanted sexual advances resigned at a higher rate: seven out of 14. However, “unwanted sexual advances” is a broad category, encompassing everything from inappropriate Facebook messages to allegations of rape, and there is no perfect comparison to Cuomo’s sex scandal — although the accusations so far are not as serious or graphic as many of the other scandals I’ve tracked in this category.

And as loud as the calls for Cuomo’s resignation have been in the media, they represent only a minority of New Yorkers. According to a Quinnipiac University poll from March 2-3, although 40 percent of New York registered voters think Cuomo should resign, 55 percent of registered voters do not. And while registered voters did tell Emerson College/WPIX-TV/NewsNation (in a poll conducted March 3-4), 43 percent to 34 percent, that Cuomo should resign over the sexual harassment allegations (numbers for the nursing-home scandal were similar), 23 percent weren’t sure — so the public pressure on him to resign is hardly overwhelming.

At this moment, a Cuomo resignation seems unlikely — but that could change quickly with another bombshell report or more high-profile calls for his resignation. In addition, there are already at least 10 legislators who want to impeach him, according to Fox News. Although Cuomo being removed from office is theoretically a fifth scenario, so far there appears to be less appetite for that among legislators than resignation (10 vs. 37), and he may prefer to resign rather than become the first New York governor to be removed from office since 1913.

2. Cuomo retires

A likelier outcome might be that Cuomo serves out the rest of his term but does not run for reelection in 2022. This would allow him to leave on his own terms (avoiding the embarrassment of potentially losing reelection) while also preserving his legacy by not resigning. First elected in 2010, Cuomo has already served longer than any other sitting governor, and although New York does not have gubernatorial term limits, only two New York governors have ever served more than 12 years in office — so it would hardly be unusual timing for him to step aside. Retirement is also the public’s preferred course of action: In that Quinnipiac poll, New York registered voters said 59 percent to 36 percent that Cuomo should not run for reelection.

[How Many Americans Are ‘Very’ Worried About COVID-19?]

On the other hand, politicians — even ones under fire — don’t give up power voluntarily very often. Of the 57 scandal-plagued officeholders since 2017, 34 sought reelection or higher office (and four more may yet do so in 2022). Cuomo hasn’t commented on his plans since these scandals broke, but back in 2019 he said that he planned to run for reelection. He has also amassed a $16.8 million campaign war chest that clearly signals an intent to run — and that may tempt him to think he can brute-force his way to a fourth term.

3. Cuomo runs for reelection and loses

If Cuomo does decide to seek reelection, he’ll likely face strengthened opposition in both the primary and general elections. He was probably already going to face a primary challenge even before these scandals; in both 2014 and 2018, he faced a serious primary challenge from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Although he still won more than 60 percent of the vote in both races, in large part thanks to his strength among nonwhite voters, that still leaves roughly one-third of New York Democrats who are solidly anti-Cuomo.

And Cuomo’s recent scandals may finally make that bloc big enough to defeat him, especially if a strong opponent like Attorney General Letitia James emerges. In the Emerson poll, only 44 percent of Democratic voters said they would reelect Cuomo if the election were held today, while 56 percent said it was time for someone new. And Quinnipiac found that James is the most popular politician in the state, with a whopping 82 percent to 3 percent approval/disapproval rating among Democrats. A Black opponent like James or New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams might be particularly well-situated to eat into Cuomo’s base, too; in the Quinnipiac poll, James was the only state politician tested who had a higher approval rating than Cuomo among nonwhite respondents.

Cuomo’s main vulnerability probably lies in the Democratic primary, though even if he survives it, the general election might not be a cakewalk either. According to Emerson, Cuomo has become downright unpopular in the Empire State, with an approval rating of 38 percent and a disapproval rating of 49 percent. (His situation is not quite as dire in the Quinnipiac poll: 45 percent approval, 46 percent disapproval.) And while New York’s strong Democratic lean would help Cuomo, partisanship is not as strong in state races as it is in federal ones, and sometimes the state’s dominant party nominates a candidate so controversial that the other side scores an upset. (Just ask Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas or Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana.) If the usual pattern of out-party strength in midterm elections holds true, 2022 will also be a Republican-leaning election year nationwide.

4. Cuomo runs for reelection and wins

Of course, it’s also possible that these scandals are merely a bump in the road and Cuomo goes on to win reelection in 2022 — as he was very likely to do before all this. He still has all the advantages of incumbency, plus that $16.7 million war chest. And voters won’t make their decision based on Cuomo’s scandals alone. Per Emerson, 62 percent of New York voters say a COVID-19 vaccination plan is more important than an investigation into either one of the scandals, and per Quinnipiac, they still approve of Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic 56 percent to 41 percent. And by 2022, it’s very possible that other issues will have eclipsed these scandals in the news cycle as the measures by which Cuomo is judged.

[What Americans Think About The Minimum Wage And Their Governors]

Even today, Cuomo probably starts out with the advantage in both the primary and the general. Both Emerson (53 percent to 34 percent) and Quinnipiac (65 percent to 27 percent) found that he still has a positive approval rating among Democratic voters, and Quinnipiac found that Democrats still want him to run for reelection, 50 percent to 44 percent. That’s largely thanks to his durable strength with voters of color, who are frequently forgotten in conversations about Cuomo’s intraparty popularity yet make up about 40 percent of New York’s Democratic electorate. It will be difficult for any Democrat to beat him without breaking his grip on these voters — and while that could certainly happen, there’s another complication. Multiple primary challengers could split the anti-Cuomo vote and make it easier for him to win with just a plurality of loyal supporters. Cuomo would have the highest odds of losing if he faces a single, strong primary challenger — but given how vulnerable Cuomo looks (and how many ambitious Democrats there are in New York), that could prove difficult for his opponents to coordinate.

As for the general election, while everything in the previous section still stands, the cold hard truth is that New York is a very blue state: President Biden carried it by 23 percentage points, and no Republican has won a statewide election there, at any level, since 2002. While Cuomo wouldn’t be guaranteed victory if he makes it to November 2022, he would certainly be the favorite — scandals and all.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/cpac-broader-republican-party-agree-trumps-party-now-76190882

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-covid-relief-bill-popular-gop-vote-76055259

Both Burr and Loeffler have been accused of insider trading, and scandals such as this can have electoral repercussions, particularly if either is forced to resign. But what are the odds this might actually harm Republican chances of holding on to the Senate in November?

The GOP holds a 53-47 edge over the Democrats in the Senate,¹⁴ and while Democrats have a path to a majority, it is a narrow one. Assuming Democratic Sen. Doug Jones is unable to retain his seat in deeply Republican Alabama, Democrats will need to win four seats and also win the vice presidency to take back control. GOP incumbents facing reelection in at least four states — Arizona, Colorado, Maine and North Carolina (the other seat, not Burr’s) — look to be in some danger, so Democrats might be able to thread the needle, especially if they can also win a seat in a state like Iowa or Montana. But it would certainly help Democratic chances if more Republican-held seats came into serious contention, which is where Burr and Loeffler might come in.

Let’s start with Burr. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was privy to daily briefings on the coronavirus before it seriously hit the U.S. On Feb. 13, the senator sold off a huge share of his portfolio just before the stock market crashed. The Justice Department is now investigating Burr, and last Wednesday, the FBI seized a cellphone owned by the senator. On Thursday, Burr announced he was temporarily stepping aside as chairman of the Intelligence Committee during the ongoing investigation.

The question now is, will Burr resign? Burr’s seat isn’t up until 2022, but he could be forced out of office because of the scandal, and if he were, the timing of his departure could definitely affect the 2020 election.

Namely, if Burr resigned before Sept. 4, there would be a special election for the seat this November, which would add another battleground contest to the Senate map. North Carolina’s other seat — held by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis — is already shaping up to be an expensive, hard-fought contest, so another special election in the Tar Heel State could mean double trouble for Republicans. It’s no wonder Tillis has tried to separate himself from the embattled Burr, saying in April that Burr “owes everybody” an explanation for the stock sales. And public opinion is against Burr, too, at least based on polling from a couple of left-leaning firms. In two March surveys of North Carolina from Data for Progress and Public Policy Polling, half of the respondents said Burr should resign while only about a quarter said he shouldn’t.

However, even if some Republicans might want him gone, it seems unlikely Burr would leave office soon enough to necessitate a special election this November, as Republicans really don’t want another swing seat in play this year. But if Burr’s position were to become untenable and he was forced to resign before Sept. 4, a Republican would still be appointed in his place even though North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is a Democrat. North Carolina law requires the governor to appoint a replacement from a list of three candidates named by the incumbent party. (Regardless of when a resignation occurred, Cooper would have to appoint a Republican. But if the resignation happened after Sept. 4, the seat wouldn’t be up for election until 2022.)

As for Loeffler, she was already up for election in Georgia this November, so a stock trading scandal could hit her hard. Loeffler has said that third-party account managers handle her portfolio, so she had no input in the trades, but the same day she attended a classified briefing about the coronavirus, she and her husband started selling millions of dollars worth of stock and invested in companies positioned to do well during the pandemic. Loeffler hasn’t said whether the FBI has contacted her, but she provided records of the stock trades to the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee.

Loeffler already appears to be quite vulnerable in her special election, too, which will be the first time she faces voters since Republican Gov. Brian Kemp appointed her to the Senate in January. A late April GOP internal poll conducted by Cygnal found that only 20 percent of voters had a favorable view of Loeffler compared to 47 percent who had an unfavorable impression. The survey also found her with just 11 percent support, well behind Republican Rep. Doug Collins’s 29 percent. (If that seems especially low, remember the special election is a jungle primary in which all candidates run regardless of party.)

Granted, the Cygnal poll’s sponsor is allied to Collins, but even a survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of a group backing Loeffler ally Kemp found her polling at only 18 percent in the special election, about tied with Collins, who had 19 percent. For his part, Collins has been only too happy to try to connect Burr’s case to Loeffler and attack Loeffler over her own stock dealings.

It’s unclear, though, just how much Loeffler’s problems would harm the GOP’s chances of retaining the seat. That is, just because Loeffler may be in trouble, it doesn’t mean it’ll be easy for Democrats to take over the seat. After all, Georgia still leans toward the GOP and although former state Rep. Stacey Abrams came close to defeating Kemp in 2018, the last time a Democrat won a statewide election was in 2006. At this point, major election handicappers still think Republicans will hold the seat.

That said, with six Republicans and eight Democrats on the ballot in the jungle primary (plus six third-party or independent candidates), it’s also pretty unlikely that one candidate will win an outright majority in November, which means it’s likely headed to a runoff in January 2021 anyway. Based on early polling, Collins may be the most likely Republican to advance to a runoff, and he might be as good a bet — or a better one given Loeffler’s troubles — for Republicans to hold on to the seat, especially as Georgia Democrats have historically struggled in general election runoffs. In fact, with eight Democrats running, there’s even a chance that it will be Collins and Loeffler who advance to the runoff, ensuring continued Republican control of the seat.

It’s worth noting Burr and Loeffler aren’t the only senators who have come under scrutiny for their stock trades. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California recently spoke with FBI investigators regarding deals made by her husband, and suspiciously timed stock moves made by Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma have also received attention. However, both the California and Oklahoma seats would be very unlikely to switch parties — California being very Democratic, Oklahoma being very Republican — so even if Feinstein or Inhofe got into trouble, their problems would be very unlikely to affect the makeup of the Senate. That’s not necessarily the case for Burr and Loeffler — especially Burr if he were to resign before Sept. 4. Nonetheless, it’s still a longshot that likely won’t alter the Senate election math in 2020, either.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-trump-fight-obama-70755704

So it’s, um, a real mess for baseball right now.

As The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh wrote recently, the Astros’ scandal isn’t going away anytime soon. But just as problematic for Manfred and MLB, neither are the Astros themselves. According to the average of projections we use to set preseason Elo ratings,¹⁵ Houston is predicted to have the second-best record in baseball this season, with 97.4 projected wins:

In other words, despite the tumultuous offseason, the Astros still look great on paper. So while Bellinger eventually came around to moving past the cheating scandal, saying “it’s all about 2020,” the possibility looms that 2020 could be all about the Astros, too.

Of course, there are reasons to think the Astros might fail to hit those projections. Without Gerrit Cole, the back end of Houston’s rotation has its question marks, and its bullpen lacks depth. The team will rely heavily on a pair of starters — Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke — who are in their mid-to-late 30s. Productive catcher Robinson Chirinos went back to the Texas Rangers over the offseason, leaving a hole in Houston’s lineup. And as much as he is loathed for creating a culture that allowed Houston’s scandal to escalate, former general manager Jeff Luhnow was also good at working in-season trades and other pickups to improve the roster, which might be missed now.

The biggest elephant in the room is whether the rest of Houston’s fearsome lineup will continue to thrive going forward. MLB’s report found no evidence of the Astros using technology to aid hitters in the 2019 season, during which Houston led the league in on-base plus slugging, contact rate and walk rate, becoming the first team in history to have the fewest strikeouts at the plate while also leading the league in strikeouts on the mound. In theory, all that should persist, particularly since it’s been a struggle for analysts to find much of an effect even for the seasons when we know Houston was cheating — suggesting that the Astros’ eye-popping numbers were more about talent than technology.

Obviously, that hasn’t quelled any of the speculation that Houston was cheating up to and including the World Series last year. (Just ask the Washington Nationals, who used five sets of signs for each pitcher during the World Series.) And all eyes will be on the Astros’ hitting numbers this season, looking for any signs of regression as a form of proof that Houston’s batters are merely mortal with their unfair advantage removed. Life under that kind of pressure — to go with widespread fan hatred on the road, to say nothing about the threat of beanballs — might cause the Astros to wilt for more natural reasons this year.

But if we trust the projected stats and the investigation that says those numbers were produced under “fair” conditions in 2019 and parts of 2018 — and generally the most recent seasons of data get the greatest weight in any projection system — then the Astros are probably going to be pretty good this season. In fact, new manager Dusty Baker even has a history of coaxing overachieving performances out of his teams (at least in the regular season), so he might be able to help offset some of the psychological strain Houston will face on its yearlong Backlash Tour around the majors. The Astros aren’t just going to disappear as a championship contender because they are suddenly the sport’s villain.

This could mean that Manfred’s decision not to punish the Astros with something like a Manchester City-style postseason ban will come back to haunt him in October. The Fall Classic festivities were already dampened last year when, days before the World Series, it was reported that Astros executive Brandon Taubman had taunted female reporters over the team’s signing of accused domestic abuser Roberto Osuna. (Taubman was fired and also later suspended by MLB.) If the Astros are again among the last teams standing this postseason, the sign-stealing scandal is sure to overshadow any of the other storylines involving players and teams who didn’t cheat.

We might think a hated villain like the Astros could help drive TV ratings if paired with aggrieved big-market opponents such as the Dodgers (No. 1 in projected 2020 wins) or Yankees (No. 3). But Houston’s burgeoning heel status didn’t exactly help the ratings last year, and the Astros’ ongoing presence on the game’s biggest stage would serve as a major reminder of their misdeeds in 2017 and 2018 regardless. It’s enough to make baseball’s powers-that-be join in the chorus of opposing fans hoping that Houston just goes away — projections be damned.

It’s usually been smart to be skeptical when someone alleges that a new campaign trail incident or another daily controversy will cause voters to turn away from Joe Biden. While he has seen his numbers decline from his post-announcement peak, he retains the hallmarks of a traditional front-runner, and it remains the case that the media may be prone to underestimating Biden because his supporters are not the sorts that journalists routinely encounter in their social circles.

So I’d like to propose a two-pronged test to detect when an ostensible Biden misstep could matter:

1. The misstep ought to be viewed as such by the median voter in the Democratic primaries and not just by the most liberal or the wokest ones.
2. The misstep should be something that the media would call a misstep if it happened to another candidate, so it’s not just trading on Biden’s reputation for being gaffe-prone.

By these standards, Biden’s bragging about his working relationship with his segregationist (and racist) former colleague in the Senate, James Eastland of Mississippi, could be a problem for him. Although there hasn’t yet been polling on this, all sorts of Democrats are highly concerned about racial justice. That of course includes black Democrats, who are a big part of Biden’s base. And while this part is more subjective, my sense is that using Eastland as an example and Biden’s phrasing (“he never called me ‘boy’”) would be a story no matter which candidate made the remarks.

That doesn’t mean Biden will fall 5 points in the polls overnight or something, and some surrogates are already defending his remarks. But like the Hyde Amendment controversy, this is an example of the sort of mistake that could contribute to a gradual erosion in Biden’s support.

Check out the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections, including all the Democratic primary polls.

Poll of the week

Fifty people have been indicted in the largest college admissions scam the Department of Justice has ever prosecuted, in which wealthy parents are accused of manipulating standardized-test scores and faking athletic accomplishments to get their children admitted to selective universities. In light of this news, we wanted to see what Americans think should matter in the college admissions process, so we looked at a Pew Research Center survey released last month that asked respondents to determine whether eight criteria should be “major” or “minor” factors in the college admissions process, or “not a factor” at all.

The top criterion Americans thought colleges should consider was high school grades — 67 percent said grades should be a major factor and another 26 percent said they should be a minor factor. Although some schools — including the University of Chicago and Wake Forest University — have stopped requiring standardized test scores as a part of the admissions process, 47 percent of respondents said performance on such exams should be a major consideration and 41 percent said it should be a minor one. (Americans were not asked whether scores should count less if, as the DOJ alleges, the applicants’ parents paid for someone else to take the exam.) Community service was rated the third most important factor — 21 percent of respondents said it should be a major factor and another 48 percent said it should be a minor factor.

Conversely, respondents in the Pew survey felt that athletics shouldn’t be a high-level consideration, which must be a disappointment for parents who, according to prosecutors, paid to make it look like coaches were recruiting their children. Just 8 percent of Americans said athletic ability should be a major factor in college admissions, while 34 percent thought it should be a minor consideration.

Outside of this scandal, the most controversial aspect of college admissions has historically been affirmative action. Americans have long shown a dislike for considering race and ethnicity in the college admissions process. The Pew survey was no different, with 73 percent saying it should not be a factor, even more than the percentage who were unimpressed by the idea of legacy admissions (68 percent said that whether a family member had attended the school should not matter). What’s more, a majority of adults, regardless of their own racial or ethnic backgrounds, said race and ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions — 78 percent of non-Hispanic whites said so, along with 65 percent of Hispanics, 62 percent of blacks and 59 percent of Asian-Americans.

The responses in the Pew poll suggest people want merit to matter most in deciding who gets into college and who doesn’t. But as this week’s indictments show, the reality of that process is far more complicated.
From ABC News:

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/WNN/video/largest-college-admission-scandal-us-history-busted-61649514

Other polling nuggets

• Monmouth University polled Democrats and, similar to other surveys, found former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders leading the potential primary field with 28 and 25 percent support, respectively, while Sen. Kamala Harris ranked third with 10 percent. In head-to-head GOP primary matchups, President Trump topped 70 percent support¹⁶ among Republicans when matched up against former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld or Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. Still, 40 percent of Republican respondents said they preferred that Trump face a primary challenger compared to 53 percent who wanted Trump to go unopposed in the GOP nomination process.
• In a survey of Florida voters, Quinnipiac University found that 51 percent said they will “definitely not vote” for Trump compared to 31 percent who said they “definitely will.” Another 14 percent said they would consider voting for him. These numbers are similar to national polls that have also asked a version of this question.
• In that same Quinnipiac University poll, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis received high approval marks. Fifty-nine percent of Floridians approved of his job performance while just 17 percent disapproved, despite the 2018 gubernatorial race being both extremely close and deeply contentious. According to Quinnipiac, this is the best mark for any Florida governor in the past 10 years.
• A poll from Emerson College showed Trump trailing five different Democratic candidates in head-to-head matchups in Michigan, which was the state decided by the narrowest margin in the 2016 presidential election. The survey showed Biden with an 8-point lead over Trump, Sen. Amy Klobuchar up by 6 points, Sanders up by 5 points, and both Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren up by 2 points.
• In that same poll, Emerson College also tested a hypothetical matchup in Michigan’s 2020 Senate race, and found Democratic Sen. Gary Peters neck and neck with Republican John James, who made an unsuccessful attempt to oust Sen. Debbie Stabenow in 2018 and who may run for the state’s other Senate seat next year. Peters led 44 percent to 43 percent, well within the margin of error.
• In a Minnesota poll, DFM Research asked about the 2020 presidential race and found Klobuchar ahead of Trump in her home state, 52 percent to 35 percent, with former Starbucks CEO and potential independent candidate Howard Schultz receiving 7 percent.
• A Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 64 percent of Americans support “Medicare for All,” or a policy that would offer government-funded health care to all Americans, but a majority of Americans wanted to continue to allow enrollment in private health insurance plans. Only 25 percent wanted to “completely eliminate private health insurance.”
• For the second time, Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposal for the terms under which the United Kingdom will withdraw from the European Union failed in a parliamentary vote. Afterward, a Politico-Hanbury poll found that 50 percent of U.K. voters said May should resign versus 32 percent who said she should not. When asked whether there should be a new general election, 42 percent said yes and 38 percent said no.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 41.6 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 53.5 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -11.9 points). At this time last week, 41.9 percent approved and 53.3 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -11.4 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 41.5 percent and a disapproval rating of 54.1 percent, for a net approval rating of -12.6 points.

But “toss-up” seems too generous to Menendez’s Republican opponent, Bob Hugin. Why? The polls. Despite having one of the worst approval ratings of any senator, Menendez has led every single poll of the race.

Now, to be clear, the margins in those surveys have varied: Sometimes Menendez led by as few as 2 points, other times by double digits. But if the race were very close, we would expect at least one or two polls to give Hugin a slight edge. That could still happen, but it hasn’t yet.

As of Friday afternoon, the FiveThirtyEight Senate model’s Lite forecast, which relies on just state and national polls, gives Menendez a 7 in 8 chance of winning re-election, or 87 percent. To put this in perspective, we give Republicans a 5 in 6 chance (83 percent) of winning Mississippi’s special election — and no one is calling that a toss-up.¹⁸ The other two versions of our Senate model — the Classic, which adds in race fundamentals, and the Deluxe, which adds fundamentals and expert handicapping — put Menendez’s chances at 9 in 10 or better. But while the Menendez scandals have helped Hugin’s chances — we account for scandals in our fundamentals-based forecasts — the effect (R+8.2) doesn’t appear large enough to overcome the Democratic leans in the other components of the fundamentals.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/fivethirtyeight-senate-forecast-update-oct-26-2018-58777452

If the national environment were more like, say, 2010 — an excellent Republican cycle — then Hugin’s chances probably would be stronger. Just consider Republican Mark Kirk’s 2010 victory in Illinois, a deeply blue state¹⁹ that also had a raging Democratic scandal. After Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich used the appointment process for filling Obama’s Senate seat to enrich himself.²⁰ With that scandalous backdrop and the strongly GOP-leaning national environment, Kirk won the open-seat contest against Democrat Alexi Giannoulias by fewer than 2 percentage points.²¹

But 2018 is not like 2010. In a blue state and a favorable Democratic environment, Menendez remains favored to win. A loss is within the realm of possibility, but the race is far from a toss-up.

All these things happened this year to incumbents who will be on the ballot come November. They are also all currently favorites to win re-election, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts. And they aren’t alone. But while it may feel like we’re becoming immune to scandal, incumbency and partisanship have long held sway in the U.S., even in the face of bad headlines.

Several candidates seem to be banking on it. The investigation into the campaign finances of Republican California Rep. Duncan Hunter predates this year’s primaries, but he declined to bow out despite knowing that the charges could come out before Election Day (which they did). After New York Rep. Chris Collins, also a Republican, was arrested, the GOP tried to get him off the ballot. When it realized that would be all but impossible, he simply returned to campaigning. And despite heavy criticism, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez has forged ahead with his re-election bid in New Jersey. All three have denied the charges against them.

Scandals in Washington are nothing new, and they definitely hurt an incumbent candidate’s chances of winning re-election (which is why they are a line item in the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecasts). FiveThirtyEight and other analysts have found that in recent decades, scandals have taken a toll on candidates’ support, to the tune of 6 to 9 percentage points.

And that’s just among incumbents who decide to stay in the game. FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich maintains a database of statewide and federal elected officials accused of scandals, which he defines as a credible accusation of objective criminal or ethical wrongdoing, such as embezzlement or adultery. (Mere controversies, such as when a candidate makes an offensive comment, don’t count.) In that data set, 48 percent of the U.S. representatives and senators who were involved in a scandal from 2008 to 2016 resigned or retired after allegations emerged, without running for re-election. Among those who stayed the course and ran (for any office, not just the one they previously held), just shy of 50 percent won.

This election season, 10 incumbents are running for the House or Senate with clouds hanging over their heads, according to FiveThirtyEight’s database of scandal.

But whether or not voters are more tolerant of shenanigans, many of these candidates are headed into election season with a sizable political advantage, one that most likely would be difficult for challengers to overcome by scandal alone.

Much of that is due to the incumbency advantage, which has been a master salve that can see politicians through all sorts of political ailments (though it’s increasingly less effective). In the U.S., we give a lot of priority to people who are already politicians. Combine that advantage with an electorate that doesn’t follow politics closely, and scandals aren’t always a cause for concern among voters, according to research by Marko Klašnja, a professor at Georgetown University.

That could be a boon to Hunter, who hails from a rural and suburban electorate in eastern San Diego and parts of Riverside counties that’s not particularly engaged when it comes to politics, according to a variety of Republican and Democratic leaders who work in the area.

That means that even though the Hunter indictment is nearly 50 pages long and full of details about the allegations against him, it’s likely that many in the area have not heard of the charges against him. But they might be familiar with his name: Before Duncan Duane Hunter, there was Duncan Lee Hunter, his father, who represented the area for many years. “Older people sometimes think they are voting for his dad,” said Shawn VanDiver, an active Democrat in the area. Collectively, the two Hunters have represented the area for nearly four decades. Hunter also made a name for himself by being a strong, and early, supporter of Donald Trump’s presidential bid (as did Collins).

Hunter’s district is among the most reliably Republican districts in California. Several other candidates who are seeking office despite scandals plaguing their campaigns are in comfortable districts as well. Collins’s congressional district — New York’s 27th — is nearly 23 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric.²² And in Menendez’s home state of New Jersey, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by nearly 900,000. Not only are these areas decidedly shaded in red or blue, partisanship is generally on the rise. Even if our tolerance for scandal has stayed the same, it is possible that a more partisan electorate might be more welcoming to a politician under the magnifying glass.

While still plenty conservative at an R+18 partisan lean, Arizona’s 6th Congressional District is not quite as politically lopsided as other areas with scandal-plagued contests this year. Rep. David Schweikert is under investigation after being accused of campaign finance violations (he has said that the irregularities are the result of a clerical error), but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not stepped in with its full force to support his opponent, Anita Malik, even though some prognosticators think the race could be competitive.

It probably helps Schweikert (Collins and Hunter, too) that they are accused of financial crimes. While the FiveThirtyEight model doesn’t distinguish between types of scandals, there’s some evidence that what an incumbent is accused of might matter. Morality-related scandals, including sexual indiscretions, (usually) seem to hurt incumbents slightly more than financial scandals (though not always), according to a 2011 study by Nicholas Chad Long,²³ a professor at St. Edward’s University. That may be because financial crimes are more difficult to understand, and complexity matters when determining whether or not voters punish politicians, according to Klašnja.

But even though incumbents enjoy these big advantages, a win isn’t a foregone conclusion. In Hunter’s case, his opponent in the general election, Ammar Campa-Najjar, wasn’t expected to have much of a chance until the indictment was announced, even though he beat out five other Democrats and Republicans in California’s top-two primary. Campa-Najjar was born and largely raised in the district, and he worked for the U.S. Labor Department and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce before launching his own business. He’s the toughest opponent the younger Hunter has faced, VanDiver said.

And the Hunter campaign seems to feel threatened. It has made false statements about Campa-Najjar’s religion (he is Christian) and upbringing. Most recently, it has been conflating Campa-Najjar’s Palestinian heritage and the growth of the Muslim population in the U.S. Hunter has described his opponent as trying to “infiltrate Congress.” It’s not clear how well that tactic will sit with the district’s immigrant population, which includes a concentration of Iraqi Chaldeans, a Christian sect associated with the Catholic Church. They have expressed mixed reactions to President Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies.

Tony Krvaric, chairman of the Republican Party of San Diego County, is banking on the fact that voters will stick to their partisan ideologies and trust in the justice system to take care of Hunter on its own. He said that he’s been spending time reminding voters of three things: First, the names on the ballot aren’t changing — Hunter is who the GOP has on offer. Second, if the House were to move to impeach Trump, Campa-Najjar would only hurt the president. And, third, the authorities will handle the charges against Hunter.

Krvaric, who is an immigrant from Sweden and says he fell in love with Ronald Reagan’s politics as a teenager, thinks the bad air around Hunter has largely cleared. He said he’ll also be reminding San Diegans that the most important thing is to get a Republican in office.

As the old saying goes, he may be a scoundrel, but at least he’s their scoundrel.

I’m going to be fairly circumspect in this article because I’m knee-deep in finalizing our House model, and I don’t want to scoop our own forecast. But one of the things we evaluated in designing that model is the electoral effects of scandals, based on the data set of scandals put together by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich.²⁴

Below is a list of scandal-plagued incumbents since 1998 who made it to the general election and faced an opponent from the opposite party.²⁵ I’ve compared each incumbent’s actual margin of victory or defeat against a projected margin based on a “fundamentals” model that accounts for: (i) the incumbent’s previous victory margin,²⁶ (ii) the partisan lean of the district,²⁷ (iii) the generic ballot at the time of the election, (iv) congressional approval ratings at the time of the election (which are a good proxy for the overall mood toward incumbents), and (v) the incumbent’s congressional voting record (representatives who break with their party more often overperform on Election Day). This is a slightly pared-down version of what our House model will look at, but it should be a fairly robust and reliable model.²⁸

On average, the scandal-ridden incumbents … won re-election by 21.5 percentage points! But that’s quite a bit worse than their projected margin of victory, which was 30.5 percentage points. The net effect of a scandal is about 9 points, therefore. (This finding is reasonably consistent with previous research on the topic.) Fourteen of the 17 incumbents underperformed their projection by at least some amount, and the three exceptions came a relatively long time ago, in 1998. (There’s no evidence of the effect of scandals decreasing in recent elections; if anything, it’s increased slightly over the course of the data.)

Moreover, the effect of scandals is potentially greater in competitive districts, where the other party has an opportunity to mobilize a real alternative. Let’s use New York’s 27th Congressional District as a dividing line, for instance. It has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R +22, meaning that it’s 22 points more Republican than the country as a whole based on its voting in recent presidential and state legislative elections.²⁹ That type of district is ordinarily quite safe, but is just on the fringe of what could become competitive if everything breaks right for the opposing party — for example, in an election in a wave year against a candidate who just got arrested by the FBI. In districts less competitive than NY-27, scandals cost the incumbents only 4 percentage points, on average. But in districts that were as competitive or more competitive than NY-27, candidates with scandal issues underperformed their fundamentals by an average of almost 13 points.

So does that make Collins’s race a toss-up? You could do a little mental math: If the scandal costs him 13 percentage points, and the national environment favors Democrats by 6 points, that could produce a 19-point swing toward Collins’s Democratic opponent, Nate McMurray — almost enough to offset the strong Republican lean of the district. But you’d be leaving one thing out: Collins is still an incumbent, and incumbents usually outperform the partisan lean of their districts.

In fact, the incumbency bonus in recent elections has been in the very low double digits — on the order of 12 percentage points.³⁰ (It used to be quite a bit higher.) That’s just about the same as the magnitude of the scandal penalty. The typical scandal, therefore, essentially wipes out a candidate’s incumbency advantage and makes the district perform similarly to an open-seat race. But it doesn’t necessarily reverse the advantage. Republicans would be favored to win an open-seat race in NY-27, even amid a very blue national political environment, so they’re probably still favored with Collins on the ballot too.

There’s one more complication, however, which is that this data suffers from survivorship bias. The candidates with really bad scandals will often retire rather than seek re-election, or they may lose in their primary. If all scandal-plagued incumbents were forced to be renominated, we’d probably observe a scandal penalty even larger than the 10 or 12 points we’re showing here.

But in some ways, Collins and the New York GOP are in a position where their hand has been forced. New York has already held its primary and Collins is the nominee; the general election is in only three months. He seems disinclined to bow out. And it isn’t entirely clear whether it would be possible to replace Collins on the ballot even if Republicans wanted to.³¹ This is the type of scandal that might have induced a retirement if it had occurred a year ago, but the GOP may not have that choice.

The Cook Political Report moved NY-27 from noncompetitive to its “Likely Republican” category after the news on Wednesday morning. I might go one step further and put it in the “Lean Republican” category instead, even though it’s a really red district. (It went for Trump by 25 points in 2016.) Soon, we’ll be able to tell you what the FiveThirtyEight House model thinks too, so it’s back to work on that.

But in general, Republicans face a very long list of potentially competitive districts — places where Democrats aren’t necessarily favored at even odds, but have a fighting chance when they have no real business doing so. That list got one seat longer after Collins’s arrest. Cashing in a few of those lottery tickets is what might turn a near-miss for the Democrats into a narrow majority — or a narrow majority into a wave.

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2018 midterms.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): For debate today: Will the President Trump-Stormy Daniels story cause political problems for Trump? This is all still developing, obviously, so let’s dust off an ancient “test” that Nate came up with to get a sense for whether a scandal would resonate.

The test — which consists of five questions (more yeses means the scandal will have a bigger effect) — isn’t super empirical, but the idea is to focus and structure our thinking. (Loyal readers might remember we last used this test for Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal.”)

So … let’s begin …

Question No. 1: “Can the scandal be reduced to a one-sentence sound bite (but not easily refuted/denied with a one-sentence sound bite)?”

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): “Porn star porn star porn star”

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): “Trump had an affair with a porn star and paid her $130,000 not to talk about it.”

(We should No. 1. refer to her as an actress, not a porn star, and No 2. note that technically Trump’s attorney paid her, not Trump himself.)

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, FiveThirtyEight contributor): BUT it can also be refuted with a one-sentence sound bite: “No, he didn’t.” So I would rate this one half-true.

julia_azari: If Barack Obama had done this, we would not be having this chat because the country would be burned to the fucking ground.

micah: I think I’m with Nathaniel, though, that because this can be pretty succinctly refuted, too, the question gets only a half-yes.

Of course, if Daniels or her attorney comes out with additional evidence, that complicates Trump’s defense.

perry: Um, I disagree. Most people don’t really doubt that Trump had the affair. The question is whether it’s a scandal, since it happened well before he was president.

julia.azari: The interesting thing about Nathaniel’s point is that that’s not exactly now I read the refutations that I’ve seen. What actually happened is less relevant than the narrative that some people are just out to get Trump because they don’t like anything about him. Which, pretty much.

perry: Right. I don’t think Trump’s defenders are really saying that he didn’t have sex with Daniels.

nrakich: The official defenders sure are.

julia.azari: But this is a persistent feature of scandal-defense discourse (hangs head in shame about unpublished paper from 2007 in drawer): With Richard Nixon and Watergate, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, the meta defense wasn’t so much that it didn’t happen, but that the people pushing this scandal are trying to deny the will of the people and persecute the president.

This was something Nixon said a couple of times during Watergate — that people pursuing the scandal simply wanted to deny the “mandate” of 1972. The Reagan line was something like “the people’s business is waiting.”

And so instead of actually denying the scandal, you reframe it. It’s hard to make a strong causal argument, but I think there is a sense in the public that scandals are “distractions” and not substantive when they’re already inclined to give the politician in question the benefit of the doubt.

micah: Nixon aside, does that tend to be an effective line of defense?

julia.azari: Clinton didn’t (that I found) talk directly about election mandates, but I think that reframing worked pretty well there.

perry: With Clinton, the general message that the affair was bad but that he was a good president and this was a distraction and not a reason to reverse the election results (by impeaching him) worked pretty well with a majority of the public.

julia.azari: It’s also pretty possible that for Nixon it was somewhat effective until the very end.

micah: Yeah.

But if the scandal isn’t the affair itself but the cover-up — it may have violated campaign finance laws, for example — then maybe it can’t be so pithily summarized?

julia.azari: Yeah, I’d say campaign finance laws are the anti-pith.

nrakich: Eh, I think Perry summarized it pretty pithily.

micah: Well, yeah … “payoff” is pretty pithy.

nrakich: Right. People have an inherent sense that paying someone in exchange for keeping quiet is shady, regardless of how many Federal Election Commission regulations it violates.

micah: For context: So far, I think the story hasn’t changed anyone’s mind — Trump supporters are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and his detractors say it’s a problem.

Part of what we’re trying to figure out with this test, though, is does it have the potential to break that partisan gravity.

julia.azari: The reason I think this matters now, if I can keep yammering, is that while Trump didn’t win in a blowout like Nixon did in 1972 — far from it — and isn’t that popular, an underappreciated element of his support is the idea that he’s being persecuted by elite liberals who will find something to criticize no matter what he does.

perry: I think it’s worth asking is the scandal: No. 1. the affair? No. 2. the payoff? No. 3. both? No. 4. neither?

julia.azari: Whatever works.

micah: Yeah, and I think No. 2 is way more likely to work — though, I’d call it “the cover-up.”

julia.azari: If you’re an unsavvy person on the left, then it’s satisfying to talk about the affair because it makes evangelical voters look hypocritical. But a savvier person on the left might realize that the gender dynamics of that are really complex.

micah: Yeah, that unsavvy way of looking at evangelical voters is stupid and overly simplistic.

nrakich: My research into congressional resignations showed that a straight-up affair usually wasn’t enough to cause someone to resign. You needed something more salacious, like an anti-gay Republican man getting caught with another man or Anthony Weiner’s sexts.

Not that Trump was ever going to resign because of this, but I agree that the affair on its own isn’t going to be enough to … do whatever is going to come of this.

micah: OK, next question.

“Does the scandal cut against a core element of the candidate’s brand?”

julia.azari: Well, that takes us back to the evangelical question, kinda, right?

micah: I think this is a clear “no.”

nrakich: Yeah, let’s not overthink this. Trump’s brand — and I mean that literally — for years has been as a womanizer/high-life-living socialite.

perry: Not at all. Trump has been divorced twice. I think it is assumed that his philandering helped lead to those two divorces. He is assumed to be a rule-breaker who uses his wealth to change the rules. This does not at all cut against his brand. It’s on brand. Did anything Daniels say on Sunday in her interview with “60 Minutes” surprise anyone?

For example, Daniels said Trump hinted that he would get her on “The Apprentice” but didn’t follow through. He seems like someone who would do that.

julia.azari: I think it cuts against a very specific reading of the party brand, in a way that makes it easier for Trump critics to accuse his supporters of hypocrisy.

nrakich: Julia, your point is well taken, but I think Trump’s brand has to be considered separately from the GOP’s brand.

julia.azari: Me too, except when it doesn’t. I’m trying to think of something smart and brief to say about that.

I would be more amenable to that argument about separate brands if Trump hadn’t won the election and governed in such a straightforwardly conservative Republican manner for the most part. He’s not Ross Perot.

micah: I remember seeing someone argue — I can’t seem to find it right now — that the shady cover-up cuts against Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric, but that seems like a stretch to me.

julia.azari: Yeah, to me too.

nrakich: To me, all the scandals about his Cabinet members’ shady use of money speaks to that a lot more strongly.

micah: Agree.

Question No. 3: “Does the scandal reify/reinforce/“prove” a core negative perception about the candidate, particularly one that had henceforth been difficult to articulate (but not one that has become so entrenched that little further damage can be done)?”

nrakich: You start to read this question and you begin nodding vigorously, but by the end, the answer is a little more in doubt.

julia.azari: I think the parenthetical is the key.

nrakich: The “but not one that has become so entrenched that little further damage can be done” is key.

Jinx!

julia.azari: Dammit! Now I have to buy Nathaniel a Coke.

nrakich: Next time I’m in Milwaukee, I’ll come knocking to collect.

perry: I actually think the Clinton affair allowed the right to bring back a narrative from the 1992 campaign that Clinton could not be trusted. They had struggled to find many examples of that narrative from 1993 to 1996.

Trump has been so untrustworthy and questionable in his behavior (Charlottesville, going to his golf courses and hotels every weekend as president, the constant inaccurate statements) that negative perceptions of him around ethics are entrenched.

julia.azari: Right, what Perry said.

micah: Boringly, we all agree here.

julia.azari: I still think there’s a party story, but maybe this isn’t the right place to tell it.

perry: I was going to use No. 4 to get into that, Julia.

micah: I guess, the one thing I would say, however, is that if some super clear-cut case of wrongdoing by Trump is found — i.e., he ordered his lawyer to hire someone to threaten Daniels — that could have an effect even if it furthers an already entrenched narrative.

nrakich: Micah, I agree with that.

It’s like Russia. Lots of smoke, but if Mueller/whoever finds that one undeniable link from Trump to the Kremlin, we’re in different territory.

micah: Right.

It could have an effect in turning out Democratic voters, for example.

perry: Yes, if the allegation is “Trump allies threatened to beat up Daniels and her daughter if she talked about the affair,” the whole scandal is different.

micah: Question No. 4: “Can the scandal readily be employed by the opposition, without their looking hypocritical/petty/politically incorrect, risking retribution, or giving life to a damaging narrative?”

perry: I know these controversies are much different, but I think Democrats are in a much weaker position here, having in recent memory defended a president who had an affair WHILE IN OFFICE with a White House intern and made some effort to cover that up.

julia.azari: This is where I think it gets interesting. Because the “porn star” discussion is important.

micah: Yeah. I think the answer here is “not right now.” Because of what Perry said and — I think this is what you’re getting at, Julia? — there are a ton of gendered issues here that would make Democrats look stupid.

julia.azari: The angle about Daniels’s line of work is pretty key to the story and yet also aggravates divisions in the liberal coalition.

micah: Yeah, Democrats screaming “PORN STAR!” isn’t a good look.

But, Perry, you think the hypocrisy matters here, too?

perry: In terms of this scandal crossing over and moving Republicans to condemn Trump — which may never happen anyway, under any conditions — yes, the hypocrisy part likely makes it easier for GOP voters to stand with Trump and say, “Democrats stood with their guy too.”

nrakich: Devil’s advocate: Bill Clinton is kind of on the outs with the Democratic Party these days. Can’t people like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris credibly say, “That wasn’t us defending him.” Well, with Gillibrand it would be retroactive.

julia.azari: I think absolutely, but that still divides the party a bit.

nrakich: Yeah, true.

julia.azari: Gillibrand said something a few months ago (that Clinton should have resigned) and got some pushback.

With the Daniels-Trump story, the thing that matters is how violent and dominating the whole thing looks. If the stories about threats and stuff seem credible, then there’s the opportunity to frame subsequent elections as referenda on that kind of treatment of women. And it’s an open question about how such a referendum would turn out.

micah: That seems like the key question.

perry: Daniels, her lawyers and others are smartly trying to move this beyond “Trump had an affair” to “Trump treats women a certain way.” So I think Democrats have a way to make this a controversy that is not pinned on “porn star.”

micah: Right, so we have to wait and see how much evidence comes out on the latter framing and how the public sees it.

perry: Right, as Julia is saying, linking this to Trump having bad attitudes toward women is one way (along with campaign finance) to make this more than a sex scandal.

micah: Speaking of … question No. 5: “Is the media bored, and/or does the story have enough tabloid/shock value to crowd out all other stories?”

nrakich: I feel like it’s been this titanic struggle between an unstoppable force (how tabloidy/salacious the story is) and an immovable object (the stop-for-nothing pace of news cycles in the Trump era).

micah: That framing seems spot-on.

perry: I would say this story is crowding out others, though. Sen. Bernie Sanders — who, of course, hates Trump — has been complaining that the Daniels story is getting too much coverage and distracting from other issues. It has been covered way more than Trump’s limits on transgender people serving in the military that were announced Friday night, for example. Are we talking about Daniels two months from now? I’m not sure.

It looks like Daniels’s lawyers have a good media strategy to keep feeding the media more “news.”

micah: They’ve been very smart about teasing developments and prolonging attention — an almost Trump-like strategy!

julia.azari: So, one of my hobbyhorses is that rhetoric and frames matter less than fundamentals for elections, but they matter for governance. One thing I keep thinking about is that this may not affect the midterms, but how might it shape what happens after them? I realize I veered off the question.

micah: But that would only happen if this lasts in the news cycle, right, Julia?

julia.azari: Yeah, or if it comes back somehow. Like, if Democrats don’t do as well as predicted, I could see that story emerging as a reason why.

micah: Yeah — i.e., “Democrats focused too much on Trump’s character.”

I guess my suspicion would be that this is salacious enough to crowd out most news that’s good for Trump but will get overwhelmed if there’s a big Russia development or some other Cabinet scandal or whatever. That obviously doesn’t help Trump much, but still.

julia.azari: If the Democrats do win the House, the big question will be what’s the clearest case that sounds like an article of impeachment. Not the most important, the clearest. I think.

micah: Yeah, that’s a really good point. You saw that with Nixon.

There was all this talk about getting articles that included specifics.

OK, we’re almost out of time. Nate isn’t here to defend his test, so let’s savage it: What question(s) is this test missing?

perry: A big plus for Trump right now is that Democrats don’t have any power on the Hill. The Clinton email scandal was driven in part by House Republicans having lots of hearings about it and leaking stuff from their investigations to the press. In other words, which party controls Congress matters. If Democrats control the House next year, issues around Michael Cohen’s role as Trump’s lawyer/fixer and how Trump treats women and uses money and so on could become part of constant investigations. Hearings make news, push forward media coverage, etc.

julia.azari: Party. Have I mentioned party?

Shit — do I have to buy Perry a Coke now too?

micah: You do.

So maybe we need question No. 6: “Does the opposition party have a governmental mechanism to pursue the scandal and keep it in the news?”

perry: But there’s another aspect to party here right, Julia?

julia.azari: Yes. One of the elements is whether a scandal forces either party to deal with stuff that’s going to divide it. You would think this was the case for Trump and the Republicans, but I think elements of the party have resigned themselves to separating the person from the president.

But as I said earlier, there’s lots of potential for divisions among Democrats. That’s kinda like Nate’s question about opposition, though, so maybe it’s just a friendly amendment/rewording.

micah: Maybe No. 7: “Does pursuing or defending the scandal create or exacerbate divisions within either party?”

Any other questions people would add?

perry: My other point was that Democrats made Al Franken resign over a sex-related controversy, Republicans supported Roy Moore in the midst of what I would argue was a much more serious sex-related controversy. What would cause Democrats to abandon supporting a politician over a sex controversy in this era might be different from what would cause Republicans to do so, after they just backed Trump in 2016 amid many allegations of groping and other bad behavior toward women. The Democrats may be more willing to toss politicians overboard for sex scandals right now.

julia.azari: The other thing is that it’s not just about a sex controversy, but about the overall role of women, sexism and something like violence or domination. And it’s hard to talk about all that without sounding partisan, but there’s evidence that these are partisan issues.

micah: And maybe becoming more partisan.

nrakich: Micah, I think Nate’s test is more for assessing scandals right when they break, whereas we’ve known about this one for a couple of months now. So my thought is that we should look at whether we’ve seen an effect so far.

On Jan. 12, when the Stormy Daniels story first broke in the mainstream press, Trump’s approval rating was 39.1 percent, and his disapproval rating was 54.5 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight tracker.

Today, his approval rating is 40.7 percent, and his disapproval rating is 53.4 percent (as of Tuesday night).

There was also this CNN poll released on Monday that found that people both believe the women and that Trump reached a recent high in approval rating.

So I just don’t think that this scandal, as it has been revealed so far, is damaging the president.

micah: That seems mostly right, Nathaniel, but I think this story has a lot of potential for further development and could shift a lot on the spectrum we mentioned early, from “an affair” <—–> “intimidation/cover-up/payoffs/bullying/campaign finance.”

So in that sense, I think it’s still a relatively “new” story.

nrakich: Lots of potential, but it’s been two months and not much has changed.

micah: That’s fair.

Here’s my summary of our answers (answers in bold):

1. “Can the scandal be reduced to a one-sentence sound bite (but not easily refuted/denied with a one-sentence sound bite)?” Sorta, yes.
2. “Does the scandal cut against a core element of the candidate’s brand?” Not really.
3. “Does the scandal reify/reinforce/“prove” a core negative perception about the candidate, particularly one that had henceforth been difficult to articulate (but not one that has become so entrenched that little further damage can be done)?” Yes to the first part; no to the second part.
4. “Can the scandal readily be employed by the opposition, without their looking hypocritical/petty/politically incorrect, risking retribution, or giving life to a damaging narrative?” Maybe?
5. “Is the media bored, and/or does the story have enough tabloid/shock value to crowd out all other stories?” Yes.

julia.azari: I go back again to my sense that in an environment this polarized, the electoral impact might wash out, especially for something like the midterm elections.

In a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday night, Stormy Daniels described the affair she says she had with Donald Trump before he was president. Daniels said she was threatened with physical violence if she went public with the story. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team debates how the media, and FiveThirtyEight in particular, should cover the allegations.

The crew also dives into new Pew Research Center data that shows Americans are as divided as ever along demographic variables such as education, age, race and gender. And after the weekend’s “March for Our Lives” events, the team looks at how polling on gun laws has evolved and whether the issue is likely to affect the midterms.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Monday evenings, with occasional special episodes throughout the week. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Poll of the week

Views about President Trump’s relationship (or lack thereof) with adult film actress Stormy Daniels are split along partisan lines, according to a Huffington Post/YouGov survey released this week. Seventy percent of Democrats found credible Daniels’ account of an extramarital affair with Trump in 2006, while just 11 percent of Republicans said the same. And if Trump did have an affair with Daniels, 82 percent of Democrats said it would have been immoral, compared with 54 percent of Republicans.

Perhaps because Daniels is in the news, along with other alleged affairs by Trump, just 26 percent of Democrats (vs. 67 percent of Republicans) agreed that “an elected official who has committed an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

I’m recording this as exhibit No. 3,519,099 in our “partisanship is a helluva a drug” file. The two parties both seem to be reversing the views they had two decades ago — when a president of the other party was in the White House and faced accusations of affairs and misconduct.

• In a CBS News poll from 1998, 77 percent of Democrats said that then-President Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was “a private matter” having to do with Clinton’s “personal life.” Just 16 percent of Democrats considered the affair a “public matter having to do with Bill Clinton’s job as president.” In contrast, 64 percent of Republicans cast the situation as a public concern, while 28 percent said it was a private matter.
• Also in 1998, Gallup asked people whether they needed to know if a presidential candidate has had an extramarital affair in order to evaluate him or her — 55 percent of Republicans said yes, compared with just 16 percent of Democrats.
• An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey from 1999 asked respondents whether they believed Juanita Broaddrick when she said that Clinton raped her while he was serving as Arkansas attorney general. Just 13 percent of Democrats said they believed Broaddrick; 68 percent of Democrats said they did not. In contrast, 52 percent of Republicans said they believed Broaddrick; 25 percent did not. This obviously isn’t a particularly analogous situation compared to Trump’s, but it speaks to the partisanship of the responses.

And remember that back then, liberal-leaning voters and activists and Democratic members of Congress were arguing that Clinton could lead the country credibly despite his affair with Lewinsky. Republicans were making the case that Clinton’s affair showed such bad judgment that he was not fit to be president. At least in their public statements, it seemed to be universally believed by prominent conservatives that Clinton’s behavior was immoral.

The details of the Trump and Clinton situations differ, but in both cases we are talking about married male figures allegedly having extramarital affairs. It’s not easy to reconcile the idea that Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky was immoral but Trump’s with Daniels (if it happened) was not, or vice versa. We should look for more polling around these questions to be sure, but it appears that views on politicians and affairs — like so much else — are shaped by partisanship, not any underlying principle about morality or sexual conduct.

Other Polling Nuggets

• 72 percent of American adults believe that students who participated in walkouts Wednesday to protest gun violence should not be punished by their schools, according to a new Marist poll. That view was held by 89 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans.
• A CBS News poll found that 42 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of North Korea. That’s up 8 percentage points from January.
• A recently released Gallup survey conducted at the end of 2017 asked college students whether protecting free speech rights or promoting a diverse and inclusive society was more important. Seventy percent selected protecting free speech, down from 78 percent in 2016.
• 64 percent of educators say that they would feel less safe if school personnel were armed. That’s according to a survey by GBA Strategies of members of the National Education Association.
• In a SurveyMonkey poll conducted for Cosmopolitan, 60 percent of young people (ages 18 to 34) said they were either absolutely certain to vote or would probably vote in their states’ primary elections. Less than half said that they have “always” or “nearly always” voted in past primary elections, and only a quarter said they voted in the 2014 midterm elections.
• In a poll from UMass Lowell, 57 percent of respondents between the ages of 14 and 21 said they had watched a live or recorded video of people playing video games, and 38 percent reported being fans of esports. Just 40 percent said they were football fans.³²
• Only about half of respondents in a SurveyMonkey poll said they have faith in American democracy; 37 percent said they had lost faith, and 8 percent said they never had it.
• Given a choice of superpowers in a Marist poll, 29 percent of adults said they wished they had the ability to time-travel. Other abilities — each getting between 10 percent and 20 percent — included mind-reading, flying, teleportation and invisibility.
• Hunting animals for sport, according to a YouGov poll, is considered morally wrong by 71 percent of American adults. The view was shared by 58 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.
• The Illinois primary elections are on Tuesday, and a new We Ask America poll of likely Democratic voters showed that 31 percent were still undecided on the governor race. Billionaire J.B. Pritzker led the poll with 35 percent of the vote, followed by Chris Kennedy and Daniel Biss with around 15 percent each.
• A study in the journal Nature of polling error in more than 30,000 polls from 45 countries recorded between 1942 and 2017 concluded that the perception that polling has become less accurate is unfounded — at the national level at least.
• Russia is holding an election on Sunday, and in a surprise to nobody, public opinion polls (these are the ones that haven’t been banned, so take them with lots of salt) show incumbent Vladimir Putin easily in the lead. With his main opponent, Alexei Navalny, barred from running, analysts will be looking at voter turnout to gauge enthusiasm.

Trump’s approval rating

Trump’s job approval rating is at 40.4 percent, while his disapproval rating is at 53.7 percent. Last week, his approval rating was 40.6 percent, compared with a disapproval rating of 53.6 percent.

The generic ballot

The Democrats hold a 47.7 percent to 39.3 percent advantage on the generic congressional ballot this week. Last week, Democrats were up 47.7 percent to 38.8 percent.

Since March 4, 1901 — the first day of the 57th Congress — 615 members of Congress have resigned or been removed from office. FiveThirtyEight canvassed them all, from Hazel Abel to Ryan Zinke, to put the current rash of resignations into historical context. The reasons members of Congress give for stepping aside can tell us a lot about the political era in which they occurred, including our own.

The 115th Congress owes its historic turnover to the confluence of two events, one normal and one abnormal. First, there’s the start of a new presidential administration. Five of the first six members to resign this session³³ did so to accept jobs in President Trump’s administration. That’s not unusual. It’s similar to the seven members who resigned in 2009 to join the Obama administration³⁴ and the five members who left in 1993 to join Bill Clinton’s.

But in addition, three of the four most recent members to resign from the 115th Congress did so because they were accused of unwanted sexual advances: John Conyers, Trent Franks and Al Franken. (Ruben Kihuen, Blake Farenthold and Pat Meehan have announced they will not run for re-election for the same reason. However, a retirement from Congress at the end of one’s regularly scheduled term is not the same as a mid-session resignation, which is what we’re looking at here.)

The extraordinary string of sexual misconduct allegations over the past few months has led many people to conclude we are in the midst of an unprecedented cultural moment. In the political world, at least, the data bears that out. There has never been a concentration of sexual misconduct allegations that has caused as much public fallout before: The number of resignations over non-consensual sexual overtures in the last two months (three) has nearly matched the number in the preceding 116 years (five).³⁵ And it seems to be a recent phenomenon — the first member to resign for this reason was Bob Packwood in 1995. Admittedly, the data may be skewed; we’re relying partly on news reports for divining members’ reasoning, and sexual misconduct wasn’t exactly a big topic of media coverage for most of the 20th century. Even so, it shows a public reckoning like never before.

In fact, only recently have sex scandals of any nature started to (publicly, at least) cost politicians their jobs. The first member of Congress in the modern era to resign due to an extramarital affair was Wayne Hays in 1976, who paid a former Miss Virginia a congressional salary in exchange for being his mistress. In that case and the next,³⁶ though, there were extenuating circumstances that made them more than straightforward adultery scandals. Not until Republican Bob Livingston in 1999 did someone resign for a simple affair — and that resignation immediately set off a controversy, as many Democrats protested that it set a precedent for Clinton (who was then in the thick of the Monica Lewinsky scandal) to quit as well. Since then, only one congressman (Mark Souder in 2010) has resigned for the simple act of cheating; four more (including Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal in 2011 and Tim Murphy pressuring his mistress to have an abortion in 2017) were involved in something more salacious.

But in the big picture, sexual misbehavior, whether consensual or not, has not been a common reason for politicians to resign. Only 3 percent of congressional departures since 1901 have had to do with sex at all, according to media reports.

As shown in the graphic above, other, (mostly) more innocuous reasons have dominated throughout history.³⁷

By far the most common reason for members of Congress to resign is that they were voted into other elected offices, such as U.S. senator or governor, or appointed to other government positions, such as a Cabinet or judicial post.³⁸ Since 1901, this explains 58 percent of departures. The further back you go, the more this reason tends to dominate: From 1901 through 1964, it accounted for three of every four departures. In contrast, since 1965, only 40 percent of departures have been in pursuit of another office.

Changes in how a seat in Congress is valued may explain why this reason has become less dominant as a cause for turnover. Before the days of easy air travel, politicians may have preferred the stability of less-prestigious local offices to the never-ending slog to and from Washington. An even dozen members resigned to become New York Supreme Court justices, all prior to 1969. Five even quit to join their state legislature — four of them before 1946.

Then there are the 15 percent of departing members who were already retiring from office (or had lost re-election) and simply left a little bit early — that is, they resigned at some point between the general election and the end of their term despite not having another gig lined up. In the graphic, you can see huge spikes in this reason in 1966, 1974 and 1978; in each of those years, changes to pension laws made it advantageous for members to resign before Dec. 31 rather than wait until their term expired in early January. (This fact alone explains why the two Congresses with the most resignations, the 93rd and the 95th, are such outliers.) Up until the 1980s, it was also common practice for senators to resign a few days early in order to give their successors a head start on seniority.

An additional 9 percent resigned to take a job in the private sector, such as lobbyist, nonprofit head or media personality.³⁹ The frequency of this type of resignation has risen noticeably since the 1990s, perhaps because politicians have realized they can cash in on their congressional experience or because an increasingly polarized Congress makes for a less appealing long-term career. Again, though, a bias in the data may be to blame. In categorizing these resignations, we’re at the mercy of media reports and politicians’ public statements, which were less thorough and less critically examined, respectively, the further back they date. We suspect that some older examples of this category may be euphemisms for sins that were never publicly revealed.

Only next do we come to scandals. Six percent of departures were due to non-sex-related scandals such as corruption (the Abscam scandal in 1980–1981, the Jack Abramoff scandal in 2006), illegal-substance possession (alcohol for John Langley in 1926, cocaine for Trey Radel in 2014), or even election fraud (Truman Newberry in 1922, Richard Tonry in 1977).

It seems that another 4 percent of the early exiters left for truly personal reasons: their own failing health (Mo Udall in 1991), the illness of a family member (Geoff Davis in 2012) or to move home to live with their spouse or children (Larry Combest in 2003). We were pretty rigorous about policing all the “to spend more time with family”s out of this category, but it is possible that members who ostensibly resigned for only this reason were hiding something scandalous that was never reported.

Back in the day, it also wasn’t uncommon for Congress to overturn a member’s election after a challenger disputed the result. (As the Constitution says, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.”) Three percent of our dataset either resigned or were removed from office for this reason — but none since 1938. Nowadays, while ballot-box losers can technically contest an election result before the Senate or House, Congress is much less willing to intercede in the business of counting the votes.

Another three percent of departures stem from unique circumstances that don’t fit in any other category. These range from resigning in protest (the cantankerous Joe Bailey in 1913, Roosevelt-hating James Beck in 1934) to switching parties (Albert Watson in 1965, Phil Gramm in 1983) to major political embarrassment (Newt Gingrich’s spectacular midterm backfire in 1998, Eric Cantor’s out-of-nowhere primary loss in 2014, John Boehner’s exhausting power struggle with the tea party in 2015).

And then there are the 2 percent (13 people) who left Congress to serve their country a different way: in the military. Augustus Gardner resigned to join the Army just a month after the U.S. entered World War I. And during World War II, 12 members left behind their political careers to fight for their country. No one has quit Congress for that reason since.

If Moore wins, you’re liable to see a lot of commentary along the lines of what the notoriously corrupt Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards said when seeking to regain Louisiana’s governorship in 1983: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” (Edwards won by 26 percentage points.) Or, if you prefer a more recent example, what President Trump said about his political base in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” That is to say, a Moore win would be taken as a canonical example of how politicians can get away with almost anything — even allegedly molesting two teenage girls — and still win elections so long as their base remains loyal to them.

The truth is a little more complicated than that. Moore — even if he wins by a few points — will have vastly underperformed a typical Republican in Alabama. He’ll have benefitted from running in a highly partisan epoch in a deeply red state and from drawing an opponent in Democrat Doug Jones who has fairly liberal policy views, including on abortion. If Alabama were just slightly less red — say, if it were South Carolina or Texas instead — Jones would be on track to win, perhaps by a comfortable margin. In Alabama, he’s an underdog. Nonetheless, the marginal effect of the allegations and of Moore’s other controversies may be fairly large.

It’s really hard for a Democrat to win in Alabama

Alabama has been an extremely red state since the demise of the Solid South. Moreover, it’s been consistently red; unlike states such as West Virginia, where Democrats are sometimes viable in races for local office and for Congress, Alabama has been voting Republican for pretty much everything. There are currently no Democrats who hold statewide office in Alabama. With one exception, all members of the state’s Congressional delegation are Republicans. And in recent elections for president, Congress and governor, the Republican candidate has won by an average of about 30 percentage points.

And in some ways this understates the GOP advantage, because as The Upshot’s Nate Cohn points out, Alabama is not only a red state but also a highly inelastic state. What that means is there aren’t very many swing voters there: Around 50 percent of the state’s electorate are white evangelicals, the most reliable Republican voting bloc, while another 25 percent or so consists of black voters, the most reliable Democratic voting bloc. In elastic states, the identity of the candidates can matter a lot; for instance, while North Dakota (a relatively elastic state) is about as Republican as Alabama on average, its results vary a lot from election to election — so Democrat Heidi Heitkamp won the state’s U.S. Senate race by 1 percentage point in 2012, while Republican John Hoeven won its 2016 Senate race by 62 points. Alabama isn’t like that; the results are usually about the same regardless of the candidates.

So the fact that Jones is running within a couple percentage points of Moore is itself pretty remarkable: Moore is performing around 25 points worse than Republicans ordinarily do in Alabama despite there being few swing voters in the state.

Not all of that can be attributed to the recent allegations against Moore, however. He was leading by an average of “only” about 10 points in polls conducted before the allegations surfaced, although there was a lot of variation from survey to survey. (And Moore won by just 4 points the last time he was on a general election ballot in Alabama, in a race to become the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2012.) Plus, the national political environment is good for Democrats and poor for Republicans. The allegations have had a fairly clear effect on the polls — even if some of it is fading now. But they might have had a larger effect if so many Alabamians who usually vote Republican weren’t already set against Moore for other reasons, such as his having been removed twice from the state’s supreme court.

Overall, the effects of the scandal seem to be of roughly the same magnitude as those identified in a 2011 paper by Nicholas Chad Long, who found that scandals involving “immoral behavior” hurt incumbent U.S. senators by a net of about 13 percentage points,⁴⁰ controlling for their past margin of victory and other factors.

But shouldn’t the effects be larger than that, given that the conduct Moore is accused of is so egregious? Well, maybe, but the problem is that a lot of voters don’t believe the allegations. A poll this week from Change Research found that only a 42 percent plurality of Alabamians believed Moore’s accusers, compared with 38 percent who disbelieved them. And Trump voters disbelieved them by a 63-9 margin.

One needs to be careful here, because the line between “don’t believe the allegations” and “wouldn’t vote for a Democrat under any circumstances” can be blurry — voters may say they disbelieve the allegations as a way of rationalizing their vote for Moore. Nonetheless, if you’re someone who worries about what sort of precedent Moore’s election would set, the better reason for concern is that Moore seems to have successfully persuaded some Alabamians that the allegations against him are a conspiracy put together by liberals, gay people and the news media. In an era where trust in the news media is extremely low among Republicans, that’s a strategy that other scandal-plagued Republicans are liable to emulate — and, of course, it’s one borrowed from President Trump’s playbook.

In many other respects, though, this isn’t anything new. Long’s paper found that while scandals can have reasonably large effects at the margin, two-thirds of scandal-plagued incumbents nonetheless won re-election to the U.S. Senate between 1974 and 2008.

And candidates are more likely to survive scandals in extremely red or extremely blue states. Just ask Gov. Edwards, whose resilience in the face of scandal was partly a matter of his political talent — but perhaps had more to do with the fact that Louisiana had just one Republican governor in the 118-year period between 1877 and 1995. In the current political climate, a Democrat getting elected in Alabama may similarly be a once-a-century type of event.