Party over purity: US voters unlikely to turn backs on troubled candidates: polls

WASHINGTON: Few Americans would abandon their party’s candidate over controversies such as Democrat Graham Platner’s Nazi-linked tattoo in Maine or Republican Ken Paxton’s fraud indictment in Texas, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, highlighting deep partisan divides that make winning paramount.

Two-thirds of party-aligned respondents said they sometimes have to vote for a candidate they don’t like just to stop the other party from winning power, according to the six-day poll completed on Monday.

That principle will be put to the test in a Maine primary election on Tuesday, when Democratic oyster farmer Platner hopes to become a candidate for a Senate seat seen as crucial to Democrats’ hopes of winning a majority in that chamber in November.

In a nationwide poll, just 17% of Democrats familiar with Platner said his tattoo of a Nazi-style skull-and-crossbones would stop them from voting for him if they could vote in Maine’s election.

The same share of Republicans nationwide said they would refrain from voting for Texas Attorney General Paxton, who was indicted a decade ago on charges of defrauding investors, if they could vote in the state’s Senate election in November.

Either election could help determine which party controls the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority. Campaigns for Platner and Paxton did not respond to requests for comment.

The poll gathered responses from 4,531 US adults nationwide, including 546 Democrats familiar with Platner and 712 Republicans familiar with Paxton. It had a margin of error of 2 percentage points for respondents overall and 4 points for Republicans and Democrats familiar with the two candidates.