It is a strange duality that voters simultaneously report an eroding trust in government while expecting less and less regarding the morality of those they vote in to govern them. The bulwark against these trends since the 1980s has been faith in local governments. Local public service translates into accountability and accessibility as well as expectations of higher ethical standards.
Molly Jong-Fast in her blog “Wait, What?” for The Atlantic asks, “Do Political Scandals Matter Anymore?”
According to Governing.com, in 1964 trust in the Federal government to do the right thing was at 77%. It fell to a low during the COVID crisis to about 24%!
That 77% approval rating was just before the Civil Rights movement, the Beatles, Vietnam, long-haired men, drugs, , the Summer of Love the pill and, of course, Watergate. Twenty years later President Ronald Reagan swept into office by running against the government. He was neither the first President to do so nor the last. He famously came into office identifying “government” as the problem. Local governments have been carrying the water for D.C. ever since. According to Research by McKinsey cited in the article “Research by McKinsey shows that two-thirds of trust in government can be explained by the experience people have in interacting with government officials, and at the local level — from putting out fires to picking up the trash to running parks — that interaction is often very good.”
In 2021, Gallup reported that public trust in the national government fell nine points to a low of 39% while American’s confidence in state (57%) and local government (66%) remained higher after falling 5 and 3 percentage points each.
It wasn’t always that way. Running for office against “the government” was a hard sell coming out of the Depression as the federal government effectively stood up to oligarchs, broke monopolies, passed reforms to prevent another Depression, and instituted innovative programs designed to benefit the common man throughout the New Deal and well into WWII. There was a lot of inequity baked into policies in those times, but most people believed that the federal government had their interest in mind.
Our democratic system relies on voters holding elected officials accountable, which is concerning because lowered expectations for integrity at a national level appears to be trickling-down to lowered expectations of the integrity of public servants at all levels. Governing notes that “the more that local governments become the new battleground for polarizing battles, the more we’ll lose ground in the fight to regain civic trust.” This is one reason why using school board elections, and county clerk’s election offices as the new focus of the culture wars is so toxic. The through line, though is that voters have changed their standards.
Research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in 2011 asked if an elected official who committed an immoral act “can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” The survey asked about the perceived severity of various illegal activities including, tax evasion, bribery, use of public office for personal gain, prostitution, lying, adultery.
One would think that most of those which are not only immoral, but also illegal would be deal stoppers for voters. You would be wrong. It must be noted that the press and historians used to compartmentalize an official’s “private” life from their “public life.” This led us to see former leaders with rose colored glasses, and view history with an undeserved nostalgic patina.
Adultery in the Oval Office under Kennedy (and before that) went politely unreported in 1961. It would later upend Gary Hart’s presidential bid in 1988. There was some debate then over whether reporting on that was appropriate. By 1998, President Clinton’s affair briefly overwhelmed the nation. Sex with an intern in that same Oval Office, or more specifically his lying about it warranted a 4-year $52 million dollar investigation by Kenneth Star. It didn’t prevent Clinton’s re-election. By the time Trump rolled around, all but bragging about his adulterous excursions and other indiscretions, it didn’t prevent him from winning an election in 2016. By then, regular actions by the President that would get the average businessman fired for discrimination or harassment no longer seem to matter to voters who were un-moved by two impeachment trials which Fox News reported cost just under $5 million. Trump did not begin the moral decay, he capitalized it spreading the sense of decay to news outlets or individuals who tried to call him out—as if doing their jobs, being loyal to an oath over loyalty to the president were somehow being unfair. He may have gained more votes in creating a sense of grievance over those who were trying to hold him accountable than any votes he may have lost through misdeeds. Full stop there.
Yes, it has gotten strange. There is some difference in how much voters have changed to being transactional rather than morality based about a candidate’s credentials. That difference is party affiliation and religious orientation. According to PRRI, in 2011 half of Democratic voters said they could support an immoral official (perhaps memories of Bill Clinton were still fresh then). Between 2011 and 2016, Republican voters moved from 36% in 2011 who said they would vote for a candidate they knew to be immoral to 70% in 2016. That figure climbed slightly by 2020. Seventy percent were fine with an immoral leader, as long as that leader was from their party.
About that shift in tolerance for immorality, interestingly according to the PRRI survey, “the shift was driven by the evangelical Christians who had once pushed the party (Republican) to embrace morality.” While in 2011, just 30% of White evangelicals said such a candidate could fulfill their duties, that number in 2020 skyrocketed to 72%. The Washington Post reports evangelical white Christians transformed from the least tolerant of immorality to the most tolerant of immorality in their elected leaders of all voting blocks. The Post article cites RNS, a Religious News Service article from 2016 entitled, “Is there a ‘Trump effect’ on public morality?” Yes. Perhaps the transaction of a flawed person appointing justices to the Supreme Court who were sure to overturn Roe v Wade proved the means does justify the end.
Tolerance for immoral leaders has long coat tails. Being ok with a compromised leader just because he is “on my side” isn’t very far from only believing in the integrity and the results of an election if my side wins. Not to pick on evangelicals, the 2016 study noted that All Americans shifted from 44% on the question in 2011 to 61% in 2016. Democrats though, remain about the same between 2011 and 2020 saying yes to the question 47% of the time. That doesn’t say much about Democrats either.
Bottom line, about half of all voters don’t seem to mind immoral candidates – that’s pretty ambivalent!
Why does this matter? It provides further cover for those with ill intent. Lying has become acceptable in American politics, normalized, perhaps by charismatic politicians, but made acceptable by the voters themselves. We are normalizing deceit. Instead of draining the swamp, many voters appear to run headlong into it, starting with election deniers who are about to permeate all levels of government.
The Washington Post reports that “a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices—299 in all – have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election.” Many are likely to win, and many “will hold some power overseeing American elections” in the near future. Whether that belief is also transactional just to get elected or is deeply held in spite of the preponderance of evidence against any significant fraud in the 2020 election is yet to be seen. If truth does not matter to voters, then no wonder it feels like the nation is in a tailspin.
Lets go to Trump. If nothing else, he is extremely observant. There may have never been a politician as keen to honing his messaging to appeal to what gets a reaction from his base as the recent ex-president. He is on the money when asked if a certain ex-NLF running back now running for the Georgia Senate’s messy personal life would matter to voters. Trump “wagered that it wouldn’t really matter, because the world is changing” according to The Washington Post. That is coming from a man who famously said, “I could shoot somebody and not lose voters.” . In other words, he understands that his supporters will support him no matter what he does or says, that loyalty to the person beats out integrity, truth or the rule of law; for instance, creating an outrageous lie about the outcome of a national election, suggesting his vice president be murdered, or supporting an attempted overthrow of the government. These are not small, behind the scenes improprieties.
We may or may not be entering a time when the Trump presidency gets judged “by history.” I’ve read a shelf-load of books on Trump and I might just read one more. In her review of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by New York Times Columnist Maggie Haberman, Laura Miller calls it an “authoritative biography” and the “definitive account of Trump’s character and how it was formed.” She opines in What Maggie Haberman’s Big Trump Book Misses in Slate.com. that the book may be exhaustive, joining a shelf of such works listing, explaining and deconstructing what he has done. Miller believes that misses the point. Trumps very audacity, his open disregard for just about everything is apparently exactly what is attractive about him. She argues that the issue isn’t the performer, but the audience. What matters isn’t the man, what matters is how he has changed us. “Trump is a void,” as the final line in Haberman’s biography acknowledges. The book concludes that having observed him, there is little mystery to his behavior. In a way, studying him is pointless. Miller opines that the crowd looking on and cheering for him is the real mystery at the heart of the Trump presidency and one that has yet to be fully solved.”
It is time to look in the mirror. The issue isn’t the politicians. We only get what we settle for. What the PRRI data reveals is that we have no one but ourselves to blame, for we have manifest the politicians and politics that no so long ago we would have considered intolerable and unworthy.
