"I Will Not Resign If Indicted! I Will Not Resign If Indicted!"

Eric Adams, Spiro Agnew...and Donald Trump?

My interest in politics began with Watergate. The corruption, criminality and daily drama of the Nixon scandals got my attention.

Back in 1999, I wrote about winning a prize at a charity auction of dinner with Senate Watergate Committee investigators for the Christian Science Monitor:

It was my dream come true. I've been "wallowing in Watergate" since I was a teenager, when I realized that developing a maniacal interest in politics was less stressful than worrying about a social life. A few weeks ago I found myself sitting across a dinner table from some of the people I had watched every day on TV during those shimmering days of nonstop Watergate hearings. Be still, my geeky heart.

I wrote then, as I’ve written here, about why we still need political heroes, and belief that politics can make a difference. My piece for the Monitor ended with this:

Before Watergate, we expected our leaders to ask a question John F. Kennedy asked: what he could do for his country. Now, we think of presidents as the sort of people who wonder, "What can I get away with?"

Can we still blame Richard Nixon for voters' cynicism and disgust with politicians? I don't see why not. As my dinner companions reminded me, the crimes of Watergate were fundamental assaults on our democracy. If people are disillusioned with politics now, it's for some very good reasons. Watergate put American politics in the gutter, and we've been trying to crawl out ever since.

Now, thanks to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, “all politics is corrupt” is trending again in the zeitgeist.

Punchbowl News calls it “A real-time EKG of the political system:”

This morning’s newsletter (I read three: Punchbowl, Axios, Playbook, and, of course, I check

Taegan Goddard

’s PoliticalWire multiple times daily), begins with a rundown of the state of play, political corruption-wise.

How do you think the U.S. political system is doing? From our viewpoint, things are pretty grim. Let’s review.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the Democratic executive of the nation’s largest city, has been indicted on five federal criminal counts, the first time that’s happened in Big Apple history…

Also on Thursday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) publicly denied that he’d had sex with any women under 18, made a vague comment about drug use and warned that he may not cooperate with a subpoena from the House Ethics Committee.

Earlier this week, the New York Times broke a story that freshman Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.) had both his mistress and fiancee’s daughter on his congressional payroll. D’Esposito insisted he broke no ethics rules.

The tally continues:

Former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) — who had gold bars hidden in his closet — was hit with 16 federal criminal counts last fall, including bribery and taking actions to benefit the Egyptian government…Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) was indicted in May for money laundering, conspiracy and bribery..Reps. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) all face ongoing ethics investigations. Jackson, in fact, gets accused of a lot of strange stuff.

With headlines like those, it’s no wonder so many tune out news about politics.

If you watch too much MSNBC, as I do, or listen to morning radio panel discussions like the one I enjoy in my NPR market, it’s easy to be swept away in the ocean of worry, fear and ever-changing certainty over our impending doom in this election.

The latest political scandals—especially the one in New York—makes it much harder to rise above the noise. But that’s what we must do—and what the facts tell us.

By “facts” I mean the Electoral College.

As I’ve been writing here since Joe Biden was the candidate, the three states that matter most are still Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Kamala Harris is doing well not only there, but also, according to Bloomberg News/Morning Consult, Harris is leading in six of the seven swing states, and tied in Georgia.

But as I read in my print edition of the New York Times today (in an article that appeared online four days ago, living as I do in a New York Times warp),

Accurate Polls Hinge on a Tricky Question: Who’s Actually Going to Vote?

“That is one of the challenges of election polling,” said Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute. (Siena College conducts polls on its own and is also half of The New York Times/Siena College Poll.) “You’re trying to generalize to a universe that doesn’t, as yet, exist.”

One of my first columns in this space was titled, “Polling Is Broken,” and I made a similar point, quoting an expert view:

A story in National Journal headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable” said,

“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”

“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.

What we can remedy is the gap between the enthusiasm we hear from some potential voters and their eventual turnout rates.

There was a discussion on Morning Woe Joe of Kamala Harris’ “meme strategy,” which according to Bloomberg has “encouraged hundreds of online content creators to make their own election-related content, trusting they’d reach people the campaign would have trouble winning over itself.”

I’m still not convinced that what happens on TikTok doesn’t stay on TikTok. Of all Americans, young people vote the least. In fact, the U.S. has one of the lowest rates of youth voter turnout in the world. Memes are fine, but show me the turnout.

Before the ’22 election, 40% of Gen Z voters said they were going to vote, but the actual turnout nationally was 23%.

Compared to younger voters, older, more conservative voters turn out
in huge numbers, and rank #1 in turn- out—76% of them came out to vote in 2020.

They’re the ones electing lawmakers who won’t vote for gun safety, access to health care, protection of the environment and respect for everyone’s rights, especially reproductive rights.

Even if Kamala Harris wins with 318 Electoral Votes by taking all seven swing states (plus that part of Nebraska), if we don’t boost that youth vote where it really counts, she won’t have the majorities she needs to pass her agenda.

Senate races in Ohio, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Missouri, Nebraska and Florida can mean we finally get a unified government behind a progressive agenda.

Eric Adams, like Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew before him—and Donald Trump today—oozes corruption. He won’t last much longer. And neither will Trump—if enough people vote.