Voters stick with party nominees despite scandals, Reuters/Ipsos finds

Party identity is doing more of the work that candidate character once did. A new poll found that many voters are willing to stay with their side even when nominees carry damaging baggage, from a Nazi-linked tattoo controversy in Maine to a long-running fraud case in Texas.

The survey, conducted June 3-8 with Ipsos’ probability-based KnowledgePanel, sampled 4,531 adults age 18 or older and carried a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points overall. Among Republicans and Democrats familiar with the two candidates in the poll, the margin of error was plus or minus 4 points. The headline result was stark: 76% of respondents said they often have to vote for the lesser of two evils in U.S. elections.

That logic is especially clear among independents. Six in 10 unaffiliated voters said their choice was more likely to reflect support for the candidate on the ballot than strict party allegiance. For campaigns, that is a warning that scandal alone may not be enough to force a nominee out of contention if voters believe the alternative is worse. It also helps explain why primary electorates and general-election voters keep elevating hard-edged candidates who would once have been vulnerable to a single damaging headline.

Graham Platner has become one of the clearest examples. The oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran is seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Maine, a race widely viewed as consequential for control of the chamber. Platner said he got the tattoo in 2007 while drinking with fellow Marines in Croatia, was unaware until recently that the image had Nazi associations, and covered it up after launching his campaign. If he wins the nomination, he would face Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Ken Paxton presents a different but equally durable test of voter forgiveness. A Collin County grand jury indicted the Texas attorney general on securities fraud charges in 2015, and the case remained part of his public image for years. The charges were later dismissed in 2025 after a pretrial diversion agreement was completed, but the episode never disappeared from the political backdrop around him.

Taken together, the poll and the two candidacies show how much national politics has shifted toward tribal sorting. Party labels now function less like shorthand for policy positions and more like identity badges, with negative information filtered through loyalty to the side and the fear of helping the other. That dynamic rewards candidates who can survive controversy, discourages internal party accountability, and narrows the space for persuasion in elections where winning matters more than personal purity. Maine’s primaries on June 9 underscored how immediate that pressure has become.