As of 4 p.m. on Monday, Ohio Rep. Max Miller officially passed the deadline for being replaced by party leaders on the ballot following domestic abuse allegations and calls from a handful of Republican senators to step down from office as he seeks re-election. (He has denied the allegations.)
And so the GOP is stuck with him in November.
But there are few signs that the Republican Party as a whole is all that broken up about it. Despite the severity of the allegations against Miller — which include claims that Miller threw hot water on his ex-wife, held a gun to her head, and may have broken their young daughter’s collarbone — the party did not pile on to the longtime Trump devotee. (An investigation into claims of child abuse found there was not enough evidence to bring charge.)
The foremost example of how accusations of violence against women are tolerable on the right is Trump himself.
In the days leading up to the deadline, President Donald Trump praised Miller as a “good person” and said he wanted “to let the families figure that out.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said he preferred a House ethics committee investigation play out (which can be a slow and drawn-out process), while Senate Majority Leader John Thune called it a “House matter” and a “family issue.” While some GOP senators did express concerns about the allegations, their numbers did not come close to achieving a majority view within their caucus.
The objections to Miller in Washington were so restrained that right-wing pundit Erick Erickson wondered last week on X why Miller wasn’t getting “the Graham Platner treatment,” a reference to how the Democratic senate candidate in Maine dropped out of his race after a sexual assault allegation resulted in a swift and widespread backlash within the Democratic Party, including from his most influential backer, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. (Platner denied the allegation, which came after other allegations of “toxic” behavior toward romantic partners which he also denied.)
The answer is simple, and rather bleak: The MAGA right is historically tolerant of accusations of abusive behavior.
As Politico reported, a Politico poll conducted in July in partnership with Public First, which surveyed over 2,000 U.S. adults online, found that “Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.”
The poll specifically found that 72% of self-described MAGA Trump voters said they would stick with a Republican candidate accused of domestic violence. That’s considerably higher than the 61% overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back such a Republican candidate, and far more than the 39% of 2024 Kamala Harris voters who said they would remain supportive of a Democrat accused of domestic violence. (Note: The margin of error for the overall survey is ±2.16 percentage points, but subgroups have higher margins of error.)
Part of the explanation may be a tolerance or affinity for abusive behavior, especially from men, considering that the GOP under Trump has become a bastion of strongman politics, bald imperialism, reactionary conceptions of masculinity, friendly toward political violence and, in some instances, has charged human traffickers. Another part of the explanation could be a generalized distrust of institutions and a belief that allegations that surface in the mainstream media are attached to some shadowy conspiracy against MAGA politicos. Whatever the reason, it’s disturbing.
A recent Washington Post report published last week supports the idea that Miller may not have fallen out with the GOP base. The Post interviewed dozens of voters across his district, finding that, among those who knew of the allegations, they were “largely wary of wading into what they considered a family matter and reluctant to abandon Miller.”
Of course the foremost example of how accusations of violence against women are tolerable on the right is Trump himself. The president has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, and it didn’t stop him from getting elected twice, or hurt his reputation with his core base. (Trump has denied the allegations.)
Miller even cited Trump’s behavior as inspiration to stay in the race. In response to a list of accusations of abuse from three women during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Miller denied the accusations, saying, “In 2016, when President Donald J. Trump faced the most extreme allegations in the world that hit him day after day after day, and people in the media, very much like yourself and others, said that he would have no shot at winning, that he should not be the president of the United States. But guess what? He stayed in, and he was resilient.”
Notably, Miller didn’t say that all the allegations against Trump were necessarily false. Rather, he observed, and seemed to celebrate, that despite them, Trump was able to prevail. He seems to believe that the same applies to him — and he could be right.
The post The bleak reason Max Miller didn’t drop out of his race appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply