Back in the day, Republicans were heckled and mocked for saying that a president’s personal character mattered. They were derided as prudes and moralists who didn’t care about governance or policy.
Well, it seems they’ve come around. Republican voters have “moved on” from their old days of caring about character. And Democrats have (suddenly) found concern for the moral rectitude of politicians.
When asked if they’d rather vote in a presidential election for “someone with bad character whose policies I agree with” or the other way around, 73% of Republicans opted for the candidate with bad character, and only 13% indicated that character mattered more than policies. Independents were more evenly split, 47% to 34%, in favor of bad character and good policies. Democrats, in a departure from the Clinton years, opted for the candidate with good character but policies they disagreed with, 48% to 26%.
A full 21% of voters said they didn’t know. The Washington Examiner/YouGov poll surveyed 1,200 registered voters.
These poll results can be read as just another way of measuring support for Biden or Trump, even though the question was asked in the abstract: “If a presidential election was between the following two candidates, which would you be more likely to vote for? (1) A candidate of bad character but whose policies I agree with or (2) A candidate of good character but whose policies I disagree with.” It’s likely many Republican respondents likely heard the question as “do you prefer Donald Trump or Joe Biden?”
In any event, the result clearly shows a coarsening of the Republican electorate. Trump has cheated on multiple wives, bragged about it, and apparently paid hush money to one pornographic actress he had sex with. He was a professional con man, bilking vulnerable people through cons like Trump University. When criticized, fairly or unfairly, he instantly turns to nasty personal attacks against his critics. He consistently demonstrates a lack of virtue.
And now, Republicans say that’s fine. So, alongside his accomplishments, Trump has gotten the party of family values to downgrade the importance of character.
In the 1990s, when conservatives argued that character counted and Bill Clinton’s lying and cheating mattered, conservatives were right, and the liberals and journalists were wrong. Just because it seems the immoral side won back then — Clinton wasn’t removed from office and was celebrated by the media and the Democratic Party for decades — doesn’t mean immorality should be crowned the winner.
But in order to defend their party’s leader, Republican voters today find themselves in the same position as Democratic voters and the news media back then, saying character doesn’t count.
