How US voters react to politicians' infidelity

Republicans are less likely than Democrats to support a candidate who was unfaithful, poll shows.

from the July 12, 2007 edition

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"Since the Clinton era, the voting public has made a distinction between moral failings that actually trade on the power of office and affect public policy and those that do not," says Fritz Wenzel, a spokesman at Zogby International, an independent polling firm in Utica, N.Y. "Sexual improprieties largely are not included in that equation."

Moreover, if Clinton could keep his job in the Oval Office after his actions with Miss Lewinsky, "then it weakens the argument that any lesser public official could be removed from his position," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Such a shift may explain why the past histories of current presidential candidates is not attracting much attention on the campaign trail – at least, not yet.

Clinton has returned to stump for his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) of New York, who currently leads the pack of Democratic '08 hopefuls in national polls. This month, the left-of-center Washington Monthly called two GOP presidential candidates and one potential candidate "the most maritally challenged crop of presidential hopefuls in American political history."

But 56 percent of voters said that an extramarital affair made no difference in whether they would support a candidate, according to a national Pew poll released in February. Another 39 percent said they were less likely to vote for an unfaithful candidate.

"Affairs are clearly not a positive, but it is significant that for the majority of voters, they make no difference," says Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington.

The same poll showed a significant gap between the parties: Among Republicans, 62 percent said they were less likely to support such a candidate compared with 25 percent among Democrats.

Such circumstances matter, experts say, and not only the politician's voter base but also his or her image and how far away the next election is.

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