The politics of scandal and sex assault
Both Trump and Biden are accused, but voters sticking to partisanship
WASHINGTON— Voters in the United States appear to be faced with a choice this year between two presidential candidates accused of sexual assault.
That’s a depressing situation, perhaps all the more so in the age of #MeToo. However, that is where things stand, with Donald Trump, the incumbent president, accused by at least 25 women of sexual assault, and Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, accused in recent months by former staffer Tara Reade of assaulting her in 1993.
What may be more sobering is that these allegations may not play much of a role in deciding the election itself. Lara Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University who wrote her dissertation on the effect of scandals on elections, says partisanship will likely be a bigger factor. She sees voters asking: “Do I want the tarnished person who agrees with me, or do I want the tarnished person who disagrees with me?”
As Reade’s account of Biden cornering her in a Capitol Hill hallway in 1993, pushing her up against a wall and digitally penetrating her against her will, have become public in the past several weeks, high-profile advocates have been dealing with how to frame their thinking around how to confront the allegations against Biden, and how to approach a choice between him and Trump, given all the available evidence.
Time’s Up, the Hollywood organization founded to combat sexual harassment, issued a statement from its CEO Tina Tchen after Biden appeared on cable news recently to flatly deny the allegations and call for the release of any congressional personnel records related to it.
“We have reached a pivotal moment in our nation when candidates for president are accused of sexual assault,” the statement said. Like those of many other advocacy organizations, it balanced a demand for more thorough investigation into Biden’s case with context placing them beside the accusations against Trump.
“No longer can claims like this go ignored. Vice President Joe Biden needed to address Tara Reade’s allegation today. We call for complete transparency into this claim and the multiple claims against President Donald Trump. As we go forward, American voters are entitled to a full understanding of all allegations of this nature. Women should be heard, treated respectfully, and have their allegations taken seriously.”
Facing a choice of leaders in the election, professor Brown of GWU said her research suggests issues of character may not be as much a factor in general elections as people may suppose. “One of the things that was very evident in my analysis, which appears to translate at the presidential level, is that scandals are sort of viewed through a partisan lens,” she says. Candidates with scandals, she says, “If they were going to lose, tend to lose in their primary, not their general election.”
Democrats and Democraticleaning independents, she says, “Are looking at Joe Biden versus Donald Trump and they say, ‘Well, he may not be perfect, but he’s certainly a heck of a lot better than Trump.’ And even if we’re talking about sexual assault allegations, Biden has one very serious allegation that’s come against him. Trump has more than a dozen. You know, Trump was not too long ago alleged to have raped a woman in a department store. And no one has really even taken that allegation seriously.”
What might be “more of a factor,” Brown says, is that Republican voters have already considered and accepted Trump’s history of being accused and the leak of his videotaped comments appearing to brag about sexual assault. “Republicans, basically when they nominated Donald Trump back in 2016, they just accepted who he was,” she says. “He has admitted that he is kind of, you know — this is who I am, right? So he’s authentically awful. And it’s like, OK, and nobody really cares.”
Biden, by contrast, has been running on the strength of his character. “Where this has been something of a problem for Biden is that, you know, Biden is somebody who says that he’s a decent individual, and he cares deeply and he’s fought for women. So where it becomes more problematic, is if it plays into a narrative that he is kind of being something of a hypocrite.”
This was directly the tack taken by Reade in a recent interview with former network news host Megyn Kelly. “You should not be running on character for the president of the United States,” Reade told Biden through the interview.
Still, Brown says her analysis of the coming election is that most voters inclined to vote against Trump — including the independents who typically decide elections — are far more motivated by ousting the current president than by any other factor. And nothing in Reade’s story is likely to change that. “The thing I’m most interested about is, will all this conversation about Tara Reade eventually boomerang onto the president? With regard to all of his sexual assault allegations? Because it hasn’t yet.”
Those depressed by the situation of uncertainty about whether the only credible choices for president are guilty of sexual assault may find little solace in Tchen of Time’s Up resolve in her statement that, “By no means is the conversation about sexual assault and power in America over.”
People are discussing this, and wrestling with it. The allegations remain scandalous.
Brown says she drew a conclusion writing her dissertation 20 years ago that “freaks her out” a bit when she reflects on it. “I talked about the fact that scandal, in some ways, is a positive thing. It tells us that the public still can be shocked around moral issues. So, if there is no scandal, it’s because there is no surprise around what is typically a secret revelation that becomes public,” she says.
“If we’re at a place where there is no transgression that seems scandalous, that actually worries me much more about our polity and our society than that individual candidates have scandals.”