Avoiding Scandal Candidates.

How do scandal candidates come about? Those are candidates who have done bad things in the past, who are running for office, and about whom the inevitable revelations come out once they are nominated or otherwise enmeshed in the election. The people who have been harmed or know of harms might not come forward upon the announcement of a candidacy. At that point it isn’t real, they have yet to be formally nominated, much less elected, and they might never be. Even if you know what they did in their past was wrong, you don’t necessarily want to confront them in public about it.

So part of the problem there can be solved by the party structure. They should have a call for vetting during primaries, including an anonymous hotline or whatever other mechanisms might help elicit credible defects in candidates’ pasts. How deep it should be, how active, is something that can be developed, but the will to do it has to come first. It is a reasonable rule that the higher the office, the more active that mechanism should be.

As potential and unconfirmed information comes in, depending on its nature, it can be handed off to be vetted by professionals, it can be shared with candidates in a confrontational manner, or otherwise explored to try to weed out potential problems before campaigning gets too far. For example, if a candidate knows that an issue is there, they might withdraw early. If they believe the information is incorrect, they might formulate plans to address it.

The other party piece of this is candidate-replacement. For whatever reason, a party’s candidate cannot complete the race. The parties need to have well-defined replacement rules in place ahead of time, and they need to follow them. Whether that’s having an understudy-candidate, or having the second-place candidate step up, or whether it’s having a slate of law school professors who have agreed to act as stand-ins for any office, chosen at random, there needs to be some plan.

That goes for national party nominees for president, and it goes for state-level candidates of all sorts. The process should not be decided on only once a candidate has hit the skids, as some of that recovery planning involves resource allocations. Putting too much weight on the individual’s campaign risks coming up short if a change has to be made, so donors and parties should plan on safe and diverse allocations.

The non-party piece is that we should continue to explore better ways of handling elections and representation in government. Nobody in government owns an elected office, much less a party-labeled slot on a ballot. Things like ranked-choice allow electors flexibility in deciding whom they really want, who is acceptable, and whom they definitely do not want. With ranked-choice, we can eliminate primaries entirely. But whatever the mechanism, the people deserve to vote in elections that do their best to offer good choices and that do not paint voters into corners where they are forced to decide between a terrible party-choice or the party they do not want.