Politico clearly wants the data from its latest survey to build a narrative about MAGA voters. The subtext, however, lands more fully on consistent polling about the Protection Racket Media.
Politico’s survey with Public First focuses on scandal tolerance in both parties, and needless to say, the data has plenty of applications in this cycle. Politico concludes that Donald Trump’s voter base will forgive just about any kind of misconduct. However, the phrasing of the question matters, especially one word in particular:
The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.
Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.
Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 percentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.
Note well the word “accused” in these questions. They are not asking about proven scandals, but mere allegations of scandals. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that distinction matters to MAGA voters, or Republicans more generally. In just one instance alone, as my pal Mark Judge has related extensively here at Hot Air, Democrats and the media inflated an ambiguous allegation about Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s teen years into an entire scandal industry, with absolutely no corroboration whatsoever. Even the witnesses cited by Christine Blasey Ford refused to back up her claims about a party that Ford could neither date nor locate, and one of them accused Ford and her allies of attempting to pressure her into corroboration. Nevertheless, those allegations continue to follow Kavanaugh, thanks in large part to the media that declared open season on Kavanaugh during and after his confirmation.
That pattern goes back decades. Democrats still hail Anita Hill for her unsubstantiated claims against Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, even though women who worked for him testified to his character and proper behavior in the office – and not a hint of harassing behavior has emerged since. The media and Democrats have spent the last decade making all sorts of scandal allegations against Donald Trump, again mainly without substantiation. That was their entire 2024 electoral strategy, and the election showed just how tired voters have become with it. They’re teeing up the scandal train in Texas against Ken Paxton too, but the survey shows how uninterested voters have become with scandalmongering targeting Republicans and conservatives.
No one’s listening to accusations and allegations any longer. The media still has not learned about the fable of the boy who cried “wolf,” clearly. Voters don’t factor allegations into their calculations because they no longer trust the elite media that attempts to sell these as legitimate scandals. There is a reason why Gallup’s surveys show newspapers and TV news rank lowest in confidence among all American institutions except Congress.
What’s more, Politico demonstrates why people don’t trust the media in its framing of the responses. They attempt to claim that Kamala Harris voters have higher standards:
Harris 2024 voters, however, drew a line. Facing some scandals, such as a Democratic candidate accepting gifts from lobbyists or accused of domestic violence or sexual assault, more Harris voters would either stay home or vote Republican than stick with their party’s nominee.
That dynamic has played out on the campaign trail. In Maine, Platner weathered months of controversy, including over past Reddit posts and a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol, and only dropped out of the race after POLITICO’s report that a woman said he forced her to have sex with him, an allegation he denies.
This is drizzly effluvium, to put it mildly. The tattoo didn’t just resemble a Nazi symbol – it was specifically the Nazi SS Totenkopf, which Platner lied about when he began running for the Senate nomination. Leading Democrats and progressives stuck with Platner anyway, even after Lyndsey Fifield came forward to allege domestic violence. Platner won the primary anyway with 70% of the vote, while Ro Khanna argued that voters should send Platner to the Senate anyway as a measure of “grace and redemption.” Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all maintained their endorsements. The New York Times attempted to “tamp and tame” Lyndsey’s allegation by framing her as a Republican operative.
The only reason why Platner’s political support dissipated was that a Democrat stepped up to reveal his sexual assault on her. Jenny Racicot got disgusted by the way the NY Times and Democrats treated Lyndsey and finally put an end to Der Oysterführer, but that wasn’t because of any principled stand by “Kamala Harris voters.” It’s because the GOP was ready to go full tilt on Platner in Maine and make him a poster boy in every other midterm campaign.
Nearly every Protection Racket Media outlet covered the Platner scandal series as another “Republicans pounce™” story, until Platner finally had to withdraw. And Politico wonders why Republicans put almost no trust in ‘allegations’ and ‘accusations’ in the media? Come on, man.
Unfortunately, the result of all this biased scandalmongering has been to render shame an ineffective disincentive in politics. That’s not a new development; Platner wouldn’t have run in the first place if shame hadn’t already been killed in politics. It didn’t start with Trump either. It started – or at least metastasized – when Democrats and the media that hyperventilated over Hill’s unsubstantiated allegations of sexual harassment suddenly decided a few years later that perjury related to sexual harassment and the exploiting of an intern was just a private issue when a Democrat did it. Shame died in the 1990s, both in politics and in media bias.
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