In a Fox News Poll from October 23 to 25, Herman Cain’s 24% led all candidates for the GOP nomination. On October 30, 2011, Politico reported that two women accused Cain of sexual harassment and misconduct. Two additional women came forward to accuse Cain of sexual harassment.4 In late November, a fifth woman alleged that she had a 13-year affair with Cain. Although Cain denied the allegations and the affair, he suspended his campaign on December 3 as a result of these “character assassinations.”6 This rapid deterioration of Cain’s presidential trajectory illustrates that the public seems to care about the scandalous behavior of candidates. Although several studies identify a negative eff ect of scandal on the public’s attitudes, individual-level predispositions often moderate this reaction. Specifically, motivated reasoning encourages biased processing of scandalous information such that a candidate’s fellow partisans are least affected by the scandal.
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