Good news for Trump: History shows indictments don’t often hurt candidates

By Jeff Greenfield- Washington Post

For some politicians, “term limits” isn’t about how long they are allowed to serve in office, but about how long they might be compelled to serve in a very different kind of government facility.

But if you are a prominent political personality facing an official accusation of criminal misconduct — no names, please — there is good news: There’s every chance the voters will return you to office even as the cloud of indictment hovers overhead. Based on history, the electorate often seems to embrace the idea that a man or women is innocent until proved guilty — especially if you’re a member of their party.

There is no better example of this than Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Shortly after his 2014 election, he wash indicates on securities fraud charges and accused of misleading investors about his role in a tech start-up. Almost eight years later, the case has still not come to trial, tangled in legal disputes so convoluted they make Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the suit from Dickens’s “Bleak House,” seem like a small claims dispute. Since then, Paxton (R) has been reelected twice and has brushed aside more legal arrows. In 2020, eight of his top aides  of misusing his office to protect a key donor. His margin last November? Ten points.Texas is a state where iss held by a Republican, but “indicted and elected” is not a partisan matter. In 2015, Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, was indicted on 14 counts of fraud and bribery after accepting some $1 million in gifts from a Florida ophthalmologist. A 2017 trial the year before Menendez was up for reelection ended in a hung jury. Two months later, the Justice Department dropped the case. In April 2018, the Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” the senator for his conduct.

You might think that “they couldn’t make the charge stick” is a less-than-optimal campaign theme. But New Jersey hasn’t sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 1972, its voters weren’t about to break a 50-year streak.

When the Newark Star-Ledger endorsed Menendez, it did so with praise : “This year’s U.S. Senate race presents the most depressing choice for New Jersey voters in a generation, with two awful candidates whose most convincing argument is that the other guy is unfit to serve.”

For sheer longevity, it’s hard to top the record of Democrat Edwin Edwards, a four-time governor of Louisiana. Through his years in office, many of them marked by major improvements in education, health care and constitutional reform, he was plagued by charges of accepting illegal campaign money, selling state offices and accepting bribes in suitcases full of cash with which to fund his Las Vegas jaunts. But he beat a corruption indictment during his third term, and while the fallout seemed to end his political life — he lost the job in 1987 — he had the great good fortune that powers so many accused officials: Find the right opponent. In 1991, Republicans nominated Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, leading a consensus of mainstream figures — including GOP President George H.W. Bush — to back the return of Edwards as governor, under the blunt if unofficial theme: “Vote for the Crook — It’s Important.”

Only after his career was over did his good fortune end. In 2001, Edwards was convicted on 17 felony counts including selling riverboat casino licenses in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. He served nearly nine years in federal prison.

If there is a lesson here, it’s that voters are not inclined to exercise the political death penalty if the charges involve one form or another of corruption. There’s a pretty widespread belief that “they all do it.”

All of this comes as welcome news for former president Donald Trump as he faces an indictment  in New York for allegations of dodgy accounting to evade campaign-finance laws. But what about voting not for an accused wrongdoer but a convicted one? Voters rarely get that chance, because once they are convicted, officeholders leave the scene, voluntarily or otherwise. A year after their reelections, Collins and Hunter pleaded guilty to crimes and stepped down.

But we shouldn’t forget the remarkable career of Boston’s James Curly, the model for Edwin O’Connor’s Francis Skeffington in “The Last Hurrah.” He was elected to the Boston Board of Aldermen in 1904 while serving time in prison for fraud. He had taken a civil service exam for a less-than-literate constituent and swept to victory under the slogan: “He did it for a friend.”

More than 40 years later, Curley ran and won a fourth mayoral term while under two federal indictments, for bribery and mail fraud. His winning slogan: “Curley Gets Things Done.” He was convicted while mayor and conducted the city’s business for five months while a prisoner in Danbury’s federal prison.

Okay, maybe there’s not much to learn from a 120-year-old local election; maybe voters would apply a tougher standard when an indictment or multiple indictments hit a former (and perhaps future) president. But given all those survival stories — and especially given Trump’s “nine lives” history — it wouldn’t be surprising if he sees himself moving from swearing to tell the truth in a courtroom to swearing to execute the oath of office at the Capitol, without breaking a sweat.