Voters don’t always pick most honest candidates

IN HIS speech about the US presidential campaign on Thursday, Mitt Romney described both parties’ front-runners, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as dishonest. Voters seem to agree. Is it all-important for a successful candidate to be seen as honest, or more honest than his or her chief rival? Previous election results seem to indicate the opposite.

“Dishonesty is Donald Trump’s hallmark,” Romney said after cataloguing the developer’s business failures and before listing some of his lies during the campaign. Then he lit into the Democratic front-runner, claiming Clinton and her husband had traded “their political influence to enrich their personal finances”.

“A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president,” he added.

Many voters agree. Even many Democrats, those who support Bernie Sanders, consider Clinton dishonest; many Republicans, especially religious ones, consider Trump an untrustworthy hustler. According to a recent YouGov poll, of all the candidates still in the race, Trump and Clinton are thought of as the least honest.

In a 2014 book titled Candidate Character Traits in Presidential Elections, political scientists David Holian and Charles Prysby of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro analysed data on previous elections from the American National Election Studies to see how important various aspects of a candidate’s character were in presidential races.

Every election year, different traits came to the fore: Leadership, experience and caring. Integrity – how honest and moral candidates appeared – also played a role. Holian and Prysby wrote: “Voters prefer a candidate who does not misrepresent facts, who does not bend the truth, and who is not deceptive in his or her statements.”

Gore in 2000, for example, was not helped by perceptions that he exaggerated, made false claims, and stretched the truth for his political benefit. In 1976, Carter won after he emphasised that he would bring honesty to the White House.

The researchers’ show, however, that the candidate who is seen as more honest, than his or her rival doesn’t tend to win:

In 1988, George HW Bush prevailed over Michael Dukakis, though more people considered the latter honest; in 1996, Bill Clinton, the candidate with the lowest “honesty rating” in recent history, beat Bob Dole; in 2000, George W Bush beat John Kerry despite being seen as less honest; and Barack Obama triumphed over John McCain despite being seen as somewhat less honest.

If Clinton and Trump win their parties’ nominations, they will be the first pair of candidates at least since the 1980s whom more voters consider dishonest than honest. – Bloomberg