A GOP morality play

by | Nov 3, 2020 | 2020 elections, Editor's Blog

We head into Election Day with Democrats looking poised to have a good night in North Carolina. Roy Cooper will almost certainly get re-elected by a healthy margin. Joe Biden has maintained a small but consistent lead for months. And Cal Cunningham appears to be surviving a sex scandal on which Republicans bet the house.

The GOP’s response to Cunningham’s sex scandal has been telling. Republicans believed they had found a way to save Thom Tillis. They turned their attention to Cunningham’s sex life and never let up. They gave up other attacks and they quit trying to do much to promote Tillis, since his accomplishments in six years were few at best. 


On Twitter, GOP operatives flogged their message about Cunningham’s infidelity but, after an initial dip in Cunningham’s poll numbers, he heads into Election Day with a solid lead. You could almost feel the frustration of Republicans, shouting as loudly as they could that Cunningham’s whole campaign was a lie because he had an affair. The hypocrisy is stunning.

Republicans spent the past four years telling the American people that sexual assault allegations don’t matter, paying hush money to porn stars is acceptable, bragging about trying to get laid by a married man’s wife is just fine, and grabbing women by the genitals is not offensive. Now, they want us to disqualify a candidate because of an affair to which Cunningham admitted and for which he apologized. 

For better or worse, Democrats have never presented themselves as the party of sexual morality. They accepted Bill Clinton knowing that he was an unfaithful husband. They are the pro-choice party, the pro-contraceptive party, the party that opposes outdated sodomy laws, and the party that argues to end alienation of affection laws. Republicans, not Cunningham, are the hypocrites here, offended by the sexual peccadilloes of a Democratic Senate candidate while totally ignoring the far more grievous offenses of the Republican president. 

Cunningham’s response also drove them crazy. He essentially went into a bunker and avoided the press for the final six weeks of the campaign. The only time he came out was a Zoom call press conference where he was continually asked about his affair, despite telling the reporters he would not discuss his sex life. After that, he avoided talking publicly the rest of the campaign. 

Republicans screamed that he was hiding. Unfortunately for them, nobody noticed. With so much going on nationally and Trump ensuring the press was disproportionally focused on him, one more politician not on talking head shows was more of a relief than a liability. In another year, where the U.S. Senate was the top race in the state, the response may not have worked too well, but with a depleted and overworked political press corps in a state overwhelmed with political campaigns, Cunningham’s absence was only noticed by those who wanted him to answer potentially damaging questions.

In the end, nothing about the affair outweighed voters’ disdain for Thom Tillis. Early in his tenure, he showed himself to be a man of few principles. He tried to chase public sentiment instead of establishing himself as a leader who stood for something. He alienated Republicans with his mild skepticism  of Trump and then irritated them more when he folded under criticism and became Trump’s leading cheerleader. By the time he tried to put some daylight between himself and the unpopular president, everybody saw through his charade. 

Cunningham certainly has problems of his own. If he wins tonight, he’ll begin service as a politically damaged U.S. Senator who might not stand for too much more than Tillis. Thom Tillis, though, will end his career as a symbol of the modern GOP, a party willing to sell out its core values in fealty to a grifter and carnival barker, refusing to hold Trump accountable for any of his bad behavior. Maintaining power has become their core, unifying principle and they will debase themselves in any way necessary to do it. Like Thom Tillis, they have no shame.  

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