Why Do Americans Keep Voting for "Bad Boy" Candidates?

Everybody knew them or knew of them. Every high school had those few girls who seemed to only date the “bad boys.” The guys who had terrible reputations of being troublemakers. They goofed off in class, spent their lunch hour smoking in the parking lot, and did a lot of drag racing and might have had run ins with the law. For most girls, that was all a big turn off. But for those certain few, they just couldn’t resist the bad boys. For a select group of Americans, the candidates with a past is also something they can’t pass up supporting, and for some unknown reason, they are totally willing to overlook their favorite candidate’s past. The question is, why?

Let’s state right off the bat, no one is perfect. We all have skeletons. Most people of a certain age will be forever grateful that there was no internet around while they engaged in the activities that would later become their “past.” But for some who decide that public service is their calling, they have given a whole new meaning to “having a past.”

It certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1962, Ted Kennedy won a special election in Massachusetts to fill the Senate seat of his brother John, who had become president. It didn’t take him long to fall into the bad boy category. And he did it in a big way. Kennedy and a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne left a party on Chappaquiddick Island   Massachusetts on a July night in 1969. Whether Kennedy had been drinking or was unfamiliar with the road on a dark night is unknown. He drove off a bridge into a pond. Kennedy freed himself from the car but did not report the accident for roughly 10 hours. It was determined that Kopechne did not drown in the submerged car, she suffocated after an air pocket ran out. The incident would haunt Kennedy the rest of his life, but the people of Massachusetts continued to elect him over and over. Why? Did anyone stop to think that leaving someone to die in a car under water and failing to report it for hours so they could presumably do damage control for their political career might speak to a certain lack of character? Or was it just important to keep electing a Democrat in Massachusetts?

 Most cases of bad boy candidate syndrome are thankfully not as horrific. But the knowledge of a candidate’s prior activities is very easily accessible. Never in the history of this nation, has it been so incredibly easy for Americans to find out the good, the bad, and the ugly about their candidates. Even in the era of “big tech” censorship, if you can’t find out what you want to know, it is a good bet someone else can. “I didn’t know” simply is no longer an excuse anymore. But even when we find out untoward information about a candidate, he or she still gets a good bit of support. Why are so many so unwilling to take that information as a sign that maybe they should investigate that person just a bit more?

The mainstream media has done its best to label conservatives and Republicans as, as the great Rush Limbaugh used to say, “racist, sexist, bigoted homophobes.” And in turn, conservatives and Republicans will do Olympic-level gymnastics to prove that they are none of those things. Is it fair to say that a characteristically challenged candidate might get a few more votes so others can demonstrate to the world they are voting for a black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, female, fill in the blank candidate, and therefore are not racist sexist bigoted homophobes? Stranger things have happened.

For many, the initial draw of Donald Trump, was that he was a political outsider. He was such an outsider he was immediately branded “anti-establishment.” And he went on to prove that indeed he was anti-establishment. Now, it is a parallel that many candidates try to draw between themselves and the former president. However, that “anti-establishment” label can also double as cover to distract from misdeeds. And woe to anyone who dares question either the past of such a candidate, or those who would overlook that past, and that the candidate may be using this strategy to gain support. They are immediately labeled as “pro-establishment!”

But the question of why support these people still lingers. It usually is not a good thing to question the depth and adherence of someone’s faith. No one truly knows what is in someone else’s heart. What will be questioned, at least here, is why is behavior that would no doubt be used to measure the moral compass of the average person, thrown to the wind when a candidate has declared his or her intent to run for office? It would seem that the criteria for moral compass measurement for the person who is offering up their leadership as an elected official might be a bit more rigid than that of Joe Sixpack. An observation, perhaps an uncomfortable one for some will also be made here. In many instances those showing support for the “bad boy” candidates, speak the loudest and most vociferously on the exceptionalism of their own faith. Most faiths offer their adherents a chance for redemption. Do they offer selectivity in the tenets one chooses to follow when picking a political candidate to support as well?

Americans hold the right to vote in the highest regard and cherish it like no other right as well they should. But the level of laziness in finding out just exactly who our candidates are and how and why we justify the support of some, who have already given us a glimpse into who they are, is something we all as Americans would do well to become a lot better versed in.