Your bag is empty.
Ken Paxton. Graham Platner. Eric Swalwell. Max Miller. The 2026 midterms gave us a litany of current and former candidates who faced credible accusations of sexual indiscretion, infidelity, assault, and even rape.
As one of the most sexually-animated midterm election cycles comes to a close, it has pushed us toward envisioning what the post-Trump era in American politics looks like. And in a cycle where Democrats are spending heavily to tie Republicans to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and accuse them of protecting pedophiles, a new line on sexual indiscretions is emerging: Voters continue to care less about adultery or affairs, while a harder line is being drawn on assault and rape.
“The one thing we’re seeing is sort of the return of sexual scandals mattering again,” said Chad Heap, an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University who teaches a class on sexual scandals in politics. “I certainly have wondered, do sex scandals even matter anymore in politics? But then it turned out that this year they did start resonating again.”
The 2026 election has been plagued by an array of sexual scandals on both sides of the aisle. Democratic candidates Eric Swalwell of California and Graham Platner of Maine, both of whom were rising stars at the outset of this midterm cycle, were chased from their political races after credible accusations emerged of sexual assault and rape, respectively. Texas Republican Ken Paxton, meanwhile, remains in his Senate race but is polling poorly amid accusations of corruption, marital infidelity and a divorce from his wife “on Biblical grounds.” Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also faces cratering polls after running an ad featuring the mother who protected his Democratic opponent’s rapist.
“Platner was accused of raping a woman; that was really the final straw,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “And it was telling that that was the final straw, not the Nazi tattoo.”
Paxton’s dismal polling in his race against Texas state Rep. James Talarico is reflective more of the corruption charges he was impeached for in 2023 rather than the adultery he committed, political experts argue. It’s an example of his lack of a moral compass, says David R. Brockman, an expert on religion and American politics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. But it’s not even the most important example deterring voters, he added.
“I’m not sure if he only had the such the extramarital affairs thing, if it would be having the same resonance,” Heap noted.
The infidelity, however, does have an impact on Paxton’s popularity among some religious Republicans. Evangelicals tend to be less accommodating of infidelity and divorce than Democrats, Brockman says.
“A little more than 1 in 10 Republican voters say they’re not going to vote for Paxton, and about three-quarters of that group say they’re going to vote for Talarico,” said Brockman. “That’s the group where, I think, the marital infidelity and the serial adultery hurt him the most.”
Donald Trump was a unique candidate in that he could rise above the moral opposition to his infidelity because voters believed he would pass other policies they found deeply important. Few, however, believed that Trump himself was a devout Christian. Paxton is different because his political power is largely derived from the Evangelical Christian community he was part of, so Evangelicals expect him to adhere more closely to Christian morals.
“Trump is, I think, just a very unique candidate,” Brockman said. “So he’s able to compensate for some of his flaws with being charismatic and rising above the fray in a way that Paxton simply isn’t able to do.”
Decades ago, a charge of infidelity could tank a political candidate. In 1988, for example, Democratic frontrunner Gary Hart dropped out of the presidential race when the Colorado senator’s extramarital affair became public. By the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Democrats and Republicans began to diverge on how they treated sexual impropriety. Many women’s groups backed Clinton during his impeachment, but came to regret that choice after his presidency and adopted a much harder line on sexual scandals. The Trump era further pushed Democrats to take a strong stance against sexual harassment and violence, but the hurried expulsion of Minnesota Sen. Al Franken in the early stages of the #MeToo movement has, in retrospect, been deemed too rash by many on the left. Years later, it took a credible rape accusation to come to light for the party to abandon Platner, who then swiftly left the race.
“The Democrats… were standing by Platner essentially up until that final allegation of rape,” Dallek said, adding that it’s “harder in the Democratic Party for them to hang on.”
This year’s Ohio gubernatorial race is a strange test case within the litany of sexual indiscretions in the 2026 midterms. There are no charges of any sexual nature against Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. But the choice of Ramaswamy and his campaign to run an ad featuring the estranged mother of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton — the same estranged mother who chose to protect her daughter’s rapist — could end up costing Ramaswamy the race on Tuesday.
In the ad, Acton’s estranged mother called her daughter a liar for her claims of assault. Many Republicans quickly denounced the ad and called on Ramaswamy to remove it, but President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, a fellow Ohioan who is a personal friend of Ramaswamy, both backed the Ohio candidate’s choice to run the ad.
The fact that the Ramaswamy campaign would be willing to exploit child sexual abuse, and then Trump and Vance came out and supported the use of the ad, makes Dallek question what Republicans will actually be looking for post-Trump.
“I’ve seen really no indication that there is a growing post-Trump consensus to read out of the party people who have been accused of sexual assault,” he added.
Democrats in 2026 eventually expelled candidates who were credibly accused of assault. Republican candidates this year did not have as serious of charges levied against them as Democrats like Platner and Swalwell, but there are multiple GOP candidates on the ballot with other types of sexual indiscretions, including Paxton, Tennessee congressional candidate Brent Taylor and Ohio Rep. Max Miller. Dallek argues that even if these candidates lose, Republicans may not interpret the results as proof that future GOP candidates should be upstanding nominees with good character because “the waters are muddied” by the cost of living, the Iran War and gas prices.
“Republicans are not going to be likely to rally around the idea that they should … stop nominating these kind of candidates,” Dallek said.
We won’t have to wait long to see. The 2028 presidential campaign — and the presidential-sized accusations that could come along with it — begins Wednesday.