Brandon Rottinghaus(brandonrottinghaus.com)

Politics has become more partisan and aggressive in recent years, but has that had an effect on how political scandals play out? This week, Grant Reeher talks with Brandon Rottinghaus, who says that it has. Rottinghaus is a political science professor at the University of Houston, the host of "Party Politics" on Houston Public Media, and the author of "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era."

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Brandon Rottinghaus. He's a political science professor at the University of Houston and the co-host of "Party Politics" on Houston Public Media. He's with me today because he has a new and timely book out. It's titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." Professor Rottinghaus, welcome to the program.

Brandon Rottinghaus: Hey, thank you for having me.

GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time, so let me just start with a question that gets at your title there. Basic question about the book. Obviously, political scandals have been around as long as politics has been around. But has there been some kind of historic, recent historical inflection point in scandals, in how they play out? Where things began to turn that caught your eye?

BR: Scandals are definitely an indicator of our politics, in some ways a lagging indicator. The kind of things that are affecting American politics also affect scandals. So to answer your question very bluntly, polarization is really the biggest driving factor in terms of changing the way that we see scandals and the less impact that they have over time. So the premise of the book is, in part, that scandals appear less damaging in a polarized era. Politicians ranging from Trump to Santos, who survive these kinds of behaviors that would have basically ended careers years ago, the partisan identity that people have basically shields politicians, even amid very serious criminal indictments or wrongdoing that's been discussed. So really it's about polarization. But it of course, is got tendrils around all kinds of other related incidents and things that are affecting our politics, like our siloed media environment or, just a kind of new age of politician who doesn't have the same degree of shame because they've seen lots of scandals come and go and understand that surviving them is a mix of, guile and media strategies, and a lot of other things. So in a nutshell, basically, the thing that's affecting politics more broadly is also affecting the lessened impact of scandals.

GR: Remember, in the McCarthy era, there was, I forget which senator or other political figure, put this question to McCarthy. “Have you no shame, sir?” I guess I guess the answer now is no, I don't. Well, you've brought into the conversation here a bunch of things that I wanted to follow up with you on. So you've kind of set the terms for how we're going to talk here. But we have talked about political polarization on this program many different times with different authors. It always helps, I think, though, just give a super quick thumbnail description of what we mean when we say political polarization.

BR: Yeah. There are really two things I think at work. And these are kind of political sciencey explanations, but they've got roots in the way that people think about each other and how they interact with the bigger political system. One is motivated reasoning, where people effectively believe what they want to believe, and even if they are convinced of something by someone else, or they have alternative information, they still believe what they believe. So that's where partisanship thrives. It's like a germ that, if you cover it and keep it warm, it will continue to grow. And so people, once they believe something, it's hard to get them to unbelieve it, or they're willing to find things in the world in news, in the conversations with people that basically already support what they believe. So that's one.

GR: Confirmation bias.

BR: Yeah, precisely. And the other is just a kind of sense of tribalism in politics. And people call it in the field affective polarization, that I don't like you because you're of a different political party from me. There are actually lots of real-world examples of this that aren't about politics. It works for sports. It works for race and ethnicity kind of bias. So there are a lot of ways that this kind of motivated reasoning, and and this of affective polarization will work together to reinforce partisanship, but effectively, people are retreating to their own camps, and that hyper partisanship is creating a moment where politicians can retreat to their base and basically survive a scandal they didn't years ago or wouldn't have years ago.

GR: I was thinking of this topic in part, more as it's sort of a general cultural thing, and we'll come back to the polarization lens and the other specific political factors for this. But I was thinking, as I was reading through your book, is there a particular moment in time where, at least in my lifetime, it felt like something changed, and I wanted to run this by you. The one that I came up with was Bill Clinton's scandal during the primaries in 1992 with the Gennifer Flowers affair. And I remember at the time, the expectation among my colleagues was that Clinton would back out of the race. He’d drop out. He didn't. He ultimately survived at a very famous, thing he said to the New Hampshire primary voters. He'd be “with them till the last dog died.” Would you pick that, or is there other, is there one moment that kind of stands out to you where it begins to feel like something shifts?

BR: That's a really great point. And I think that's a moment that you're certainly seeing a lot of that change in the book and in other scholarship. I use the 90s as a kind of cut point for a politician, so it makes sense to basically have it as the pre- and post-moment. I do think that the moment that preceded it is as important as the moment you describe. The moment that preceded it was Gary Hart being essentially be in the middle of a scandal where he was reported to have an affair, and as a married man, and it was a media feeding frenzy. It ultimately didn't show anything definitive, but it definitely suggested that the scandals that are affecting people are now really killing careers. But a short four years later, you have Bill Clinton surviving what was more or less the same kind of scandal. Part of it was about his own initiative. Part of it was the politics of that moment allowed it to happen. But I think you're exactly right to pinpoint that as one of those pivot points. And, to be able to see what that transition looked like from a prior scandal, to me, also was telling, because these scandals aren't isolated, they don't exist in a vacuum. They're all building on each other. And so politicians recognize that other people have been in similar situations, and they've used a certain kind of playbook to get out of it. And that really is, I think, the tale of the tape you're seeing scandals really unfold in ways that we hadn't before. And even though the kinds of things politicians do to embarrass themselves, their families tend to be kind of similar. It's still the case that now that they're able to wiggle out of them in ways that they weren't before.

GR: You know, they've you mentioned Gary Hart. This was a situation where the truth is stranger than fiction. On the boat was "Monkey Business" where this supposed to have taken place. And then, as I recall, the woman involved, Donna Rice, went on to make quite a bit of money selling jeans on television. I'm Grant Reeher.

BR: Yes, all about recovery.

GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, somebody was the better for it, I suppose. I'm Grant Reeher, and you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus. He's published a new book titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." So, just to think about the current era we're in and, basic question on this. If you're a politician, you get caught in one of these. What kinds of responses are currently the most effective? Is it just digging in? Is it ignoring it? Is it attacking your attacker or what? What what do you what do you see people doing?

BR: That's a it's a really good question, and definitely one that gets to the heart of how politicians' strategies have changed. Part of the reason they're able to solve these things and to, to be able to survive these things is that they are effectively using this new playbook. A lot of people look at Donald Trump as being the architect of this playbook, but he is not the only one. There are a lot of authors on this kind of playbook, but in a nutshell, a lot of what happens is that you do see the kind of retreating to the base where politicians will say things like, this other great political force, the opposite of us, the others are trying to get you, but I'm in the way. So a lot of politicians like Matt Gaetz, for instance, use almost literally this exact language to say that there's this unseen liberal democratic force that's out to get your, the kind of voters that he cares about, the constituencies he cares about. And he's the only one in the way. So he gets snared in these types of scandals. It's obviously wrong and misleading to imply these are happening, but it is a useful tool for politicians because they are harnessing this affective polarization, this hyper partisanship. So that's one thing that they do. We also look at other projects. In other projects, we look at stonewalling, where politicians simply say nothing or claim this is a political witch hunt that also can be effective in certain kinds of situations. It depends a bit on the specifics. So we find is that when politicians stonewall, they're more likely to do so if they think the truth won't be revealed. That is, if it's something that's kind of private, or maybe it's a complicated legal issue that won't ultimately be resolved before they leave office, they can essentially stonewall and push the boundaries. So there are some very common techniques we're seeing. And it is, I think, wearing on the American people a little bit to see the lying or even outright falsehoods, even when presented with evidence that a person has done something wrong.

GR: Yeah. The stonewalling certainly. I can think of a whole bunch of examples that come to my mind with that. Let me ask you this hypothetical question again. I want to go back in time. I ask you to go back in time. What do you think is the most important example of a past scandal that did end someone's political career? That if it were to happen today, you think the person at the center would probably have survived it?

BR: Yeah, it's a good question. We see a lot of times where scandal still do hurt politicians. One recent example is Governor Walz in Minnesota. Although the scandal itself wasn't connected to him, it definitely affected his administration in the perception that he could do a good job. So there is definitely still times where this happens. I think the kind of scandals that now exist that would have in the past hurt a candidate typically involve morality, something that a person has done that creates, a negative experience for themselves, their family, maybe something that is hypocritical, they contradict themselves either as a moral question or maybe as a political question. These are the kind of things that, in the past, a politician might get tripped up on. But in the kind of current moment you're likely to see them survive, those, because either the voters don't really care and or you've got the politicians with tools that let them sidestep this. And, we can't ignore the voters in this because voters are willing to forgive in ways that they weren't before. It's not necessarily that they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart, or they see a kind of, moral clarity from this kind of apology or absolution. But they rather see this as a partisan fight, and they're willing to back the partisans that they like, even in the conditions where there's something bad going on with that person.

GR: You know, I wanted to ask you about this, this potential example, because it gets at your argument about partisanship, I think, and that was Richard Nixon. I have heard, usually they're Democratic commentators, but I've heard commentators say, if Richard Nixon were to have Watergate today, he would have hung in there. The reason why ultimately he decided to resign was because they didn't have the votes among the Republicans. There's a there's a famous moment where he's confronted with this fact. He says, how many do we have? It's like, “no, almost none, sir.” So today, though, with the partisanship, you could easily imagine, like all the Republicans just sticking with him, and you're not going to get two-thirds of the Senate to convict. I wonder, do you think, do you think Richard Nixon survives Watergate in 2026?

BR: I think the short answer is yes, in part because, as you're describing, you definitely see a kind of unity. Now, you didn't see before this actually happened for Bill Clinton when the scandal, accusations came out, all of the delegation, including all of his cabinet, stepped up and said, we support the president. We're backing him. So obviously, it's something that is a useful tool. And although there's no academic work exactly on this, I've long thought about the way that unity matters to politicians and how that gives them this bigger shield. So that I think that's definitely kind of one major element here. I think Nixon would have survived. I mean, to some degree, he did survive. The way I kind of track this in the book is that we can look at these survival models that basically track how long a person survives in office after a scandal, and it's getting longer and longer as time goes on. So in a polarized era, you see politicians hanging on for longer. And that definitely is something that would have been a plus for Nixon because you can just kind of drag things out and, he resigns early, but it wasn't, it wasn't immediately, he definitely hung in there for several years before the kind of facts caught up to him. The last reason, I think, that it's the case that the Watergate would have been, more of a nothing burger back then, is that the media now don't have the same kind of reach. This fact that we're seeing two things happening. Number one, the media itself is kind of winnowing and in narrowing, that's something that scholars have shown that does have an effect on reducing the likelihood of the scandals are revealed. And the other is that people just don't believe the media. So you have reports that come out that say, Richard Nixon involved in these things. You've got Woodward, Bernstein kind of digging, getting each of the individual, members of the staff and sort of picking out these sort of moments of wrongdoing. And people just wouldn't believe it.

GR: So they would just say, I'll just say, oh, that's "The Washington Post," right? If you're a Republican, that's "The Washington Post."

BR: Yeah, precisely. And they definitely did that too. But the process is so much more aggressive now. And I think that divide is so much more clear now that it's really a challenge to get people to believe it when they're confronted with actual wrongdoing from politicians.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Brandon Rottinghaus. He's a political science professor at the University of Houston, and we've been discussing his new book. It's titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." The one thing that I was thinking about a lot because I observe a lot of local and regional politics here in this area, are the dynamics of this different at different levels of office? For example, we still have a lot of officeholders here in upstate New York who resigned amid these scandals fairly early on. They don't, they're not able to hunker down. Do you see any dynamic in that regard at different levels of office?

BR: That's such a great question. We don't have great data on the level of scandal below, say, Congress. The book in this case uses presidents, governors, and members of Congress, House, and Senate. So we don't have a lot of details about what happens at the lower level. So I'll just start there. I'd love to do more of that, because I do think you're right that if we're seeing this pattern, we ought to see it all the way down the way. I do think that you see moments where politicians are willing to stand up and kind of fight back against these kinds of scandals, for instance, I just saw a headline and read a story last week about a local mayor in a North Texas town, and the kind of accusation against him were that there were some fraud issues at work. And the city council used its power to sanction that mayor, and the mayor said, basically, quote, "I wear it as a badge of honor." So there is, again, a kind of tribalism at work. Politicians might use these scandals as a way to be able to aggravate the base. One of the reasons that scandals are less impactful and that scandals really, in some ways, can be a positive for a politician, is that they use it to raise money, they can use it to aggravate their base. And those kind of partisan appeals do have serious impacts in terms of how politicians are able to survive. So in a way, having a scandal is like, positive, as a, as a political, kind of tool. So, I do think you're seeing it at other levels. Again, there's no universal like sort of playbook for scandal. We don't see it happening in every case. Right. Because people are different. The scandals are all different. The level of government and your support is all different. But what we do know is that institutionally, the stronger a person is, the more likely they are to survive. So the kind of inputs in politics we think of as powerful, like having more members who support you, more money, a longer term in office. These are all things that basically are, the elements that help a politician survive a scandal.

GR: You've given me an idea for a new political novel, and that's a president that intentionally creates their own scandals…

BR: I love it.

GR: In order to raise money.

BR: I love it.

GR: Well. And perhaps in that vein, my next question for you is one that you probably anticipated from the very beginning. The elephant, both literally and figuratively, hovering over this book and hover, hovering over this conversation is, of course, Donald Trump. Has he simply taken this to another level, or has he changed, you've said he didn't invent this? In an earlier point, our conversation. But has this been a qualitative shift with Donald Trump, or it's simply just taking this out on the axis further?

BR: I think that Donald Trump is a continuation of the kind of trends we've seen in how politicians are able to survive scandals. One of the things the book does is look closely at the resign rates for members of Congress and for governors and for presidents and their staff over time. And you see a bit of a safety uptick for the moment where Donald Trump comes into office, that is, they're able to survive scandals a little bit longer. But really, the 90s were the time where politicians were surviving scandals pretty significantly, and in the 70s, they would survive them a lot less frequently. So you're seeing a kind of gradual movement. It's not a linear movement because things kind of go up and down, and depending on how you cluster the cases and the data, it can change. But definitely, you see a change with Donald Trump. The fact that he is the most scandal-ridden president in history definitely gets him a spot on the Mount Rushmore of scandalized.

GR: Oh, he's got ideas about that, I understand.

BR: Yes, and it is definitely something that we've seen before. But what's interesting is that part of the book looks at the kind of legacies of presidents and what happens when they're caught in scandals. Does it change perceptions of their legacy? And so, in a different kind of world, I do this survey of presidential greatness with a colleague of mine at Coastal Carolina. And so we looked at to see whether or not scandals were impactful in terms of legacy of presidents. And we found that it was modestly true. Most of the scandals didn't have that much of an effect. The only times it did, or for Donald Trump in his the Ukraine scandal in his first term, and for the Teapot Dome scandal, those are the two scandals that actually had an impact on the perception of presidential greatness. So it definitely is wearing on him a little bit. There's no question that it's creating political controversy, and that is getting him off message, which to me is probably the most damaging thing. I don't think it's going to be a criminal matter. It's not going to be a moral issue. I think people are past that in terms of thinking about where Donald Trump is. So to answer the question briefly, basically, Donald Trump didn't start this, but he certainly has found a really, I think, intense and really clear rhythm for how to survive a scandal.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is the University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus. There's been a lot of discussion recently about lawfare, and that is using the criminal justice system to both pursue and hopefully eliminate political opponents for those who are using it. Again, Donald Trump has used this very aggressively. He was also arguably, subject, of it. Letitia James announced that she would prosecute Donald Trump before she was even elected to the New York State Attorney General's office. So has lawfare changed this, or do you see this as just another tool in the toolkit about this different way of doing scandals?

BR: This is highly problematic in a system like this where you've got very thin guardrails in some instances between the executive branch and DOJ in terms of those prosecutorial conduct. So I definitely think this has to be resolved. And in the book, I do offer kind of some solutions for how to fix some of these issues or address some of these issues. So I think you're exactly right to pinpoint this. Certainly, that's part of what's going on there. Scholarship in the late 1980s that did imply that the future of politics, especially as tribalism increased, was going to be about using scandals against each other. And you definitely see that as part of the way that these kind of events unfold. The thing is, like we said, that people and voters especially tend to look past these things because it feels like it's everywhere, right? It feels like these are just kind of riddling the entire system. So any person who runs for office of any type is going to get some kind of criticism when people perceive this as being either really important and the worst thing politicians ever done or not an issue at all. So that divide still exists in a way that's problematic. But definitely, the use of these kinds of tools to attack opponents is highly problematic. And part of this story. It's not exactly the full story because you do still see politicians, opponents bringing out these things. And that can be damaging. You still see, the ways the media are investigating that also have impacts in terms of releasing and revealing these scandals. So there are a lot of other ways that scandals get unfolded. And to the extent to which people are willing to use these against each other, you're certainly, I think, seeing lawfare as part of that story.

GR: Yeah, I'm very concerned about it, too, and I just don't see the mechanism that's going to end it. Bottom line assessment, thinking about how scandal has changed, and you associate very convincingly partisanship with this. You've done that in our conversation too, but it's there in your book, has either party on the whole, you think benefited from this change in the way that scandals now are going down and being responded to, someone come out on the better end of this?

BR: That's a great question. The short answer is no. That scandals tend to affect all politicians of both parties, and you don't see the kind of impact of surviving a scandal greater for one party or the other. But I use that as a control variable, and it never shows up a significant to the kind of more technical language. So the I think implication from that is that really it affects everybody almost equally. We see politicians of both parties struggling through these scandals and finding ways to be able to navigate them without having any kind of real serious kind of implications.

GR: And we've got about a couple of minutes left, and I've got really one major question that I wanted to make sure that I gave you a little bit of time to speculate about. I want to look to the future now. Been asking you a lot of questions about the past. You've spoken to this a little bit, but where do you see all this going in your scandal crystal ball? Are we headed for, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, the end of scandal as we know it?

BR: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think we're seeing some changes in terms of how people perceive scandals. So, for instance, one of the things I do in the book is ask people survey questions about scandals to come. So, like you said, we're looking at scandals in the past that involve fraud or things like that. But tomorrow scandals are going to be when a person is found to have, nude pictures on the internet, or they've smoked marijuana or done drugs in a time where it was not legal to do that. So I probe people in surveys about these kinds of things and find what really is, I think, true from what was the moment when scandals mattered, where there's a certain morality that people still retain, there's still, kind of resistance to, and really forgiving people for some things that there are problematic from a moral or legal perspective. So there is still a bright line for a lot of people. And I think that's a good thing because we should have these. The book ends in a way to suggest that we need these scandals that essentially they are like a canary in the coal mine, that we're in a world where if we don't have these revelations of wrongdoing, then we might simply miss it, or politicians might get away with it. Those things are difficult from a legal perspective, but I think from a systemic perspective in American politics, we need to have these scandals show us why things are bad and then how we can fix them. There are different ways we can do this. We can increase civic education. We can revitalize the media, especially local media. We can depolarize information systems. These are all things that give us a chance to be able to make sure people understand the impacts of scandal and put it in its right place. I have a series of questions people should ask themselves in the book. That basically is a guidepost for figuring out when something goes wrong, how bad is it? And if it affects a politician you don't like, does it change your opinions of things? And I think it gives people some self-introspection when it comes to thinking about these different issues and the way that we can solve them and have them really impactful going forward.

GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. That was Brandon Rottinghaus. And again, his new book is titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." And as Professor Rottinghaus just alluded there, if you read the book, you'll leave with some questions and guideposts to help you sort things out as a citizen. And so that's the best mark of a political science book. Professor Rottinghaus, thanks again for talking with me. I really learned a lot from this conversation. Appreciate it.

BR: Thanks, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media Conversations in the Public Interest.