Curiously, the arena where scandal matters least isn’t the presidency—it’s the states. Gubernatorial scandals have dropped markedly since 2011, not because governors have grown more virtuous but because oversight has weakened. Single-party control at the state level has increased substantially over the past 15 to 20 years; today 38 states have unified one-party government. When one party controls both the governorship and the legislature, each has little incentive to scrutinize the other. Fewer investigations mean that fewer scandals become public, and fewer still result in resignations.
Increasing polarization also coincides with increasing partisan hostility. In 2016, for example, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans. By 2022, that number had jumped to 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats.
This political landscape makes it possible for politicians to leverage partisanship to survive scandals or even to literally capitalize on them. Rottinghaus points to the day Trump was convicted of felony campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments to silence news of his affair with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Trump claimed that he was the target of a witch hunt, and his partisans agreed, showering him with tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in a 24-hour period. “Claims of misinformation generate larger gains for politicians than simply ignoring the scandal or apologizing, making it a preferred strategy and more politically effective than a simple denial,” Rottinghaus observes drily.
That dynamic echoes the antebellum South’s reaction to Brooks. Then, as now, intense partisanship enabled supporters to celebrate transgression as heroism. Political scientists do not have surveys of partisanship from the 1850s, but you don’t need surveys to figure out that the era was characterized by increasing regional and partisan tensions. The country at the time was more divided than it has ever been; that’s why there was a civil war. In such a situation, Rottinghaus’s analysis suggests that you should see partisans willing to ignore and even cheer on scandals—which is exactly what happened with Butler and Brooks.