Nov. 4, 2025, 10:07 a.m.
Campaigns have entered the digital age, and so have their opposition scandals.
As a younger generation joins the political fray, they’re more likely to have digital skeletons in their closets—from regrettable posts under an anonymous username to long-forgotten texts buried in group messages.
Just look at the last two months: Leaked texts from Virginia attorney general candidate and former Del. Jay Jones showed him fantasizing in 2022 about shooting then-House Speaker Todd Gilbert. Young Republicans were caught in a group chat using racial slurs, praising Hitler, and talking about raping their enemies. In Maine, deleted Reddit posts showed Senate candidate and oyster farmer Graham Platner calling himself a communist and suggesting some political resistance requires firearms. And in D.C., Office of Special Counsel nominee Paul Ingrassia said in a group message that he had “a Nazi streak” and that the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”
Voters will increasingly have to weigh in on what past online behavior from candidates is acceptable.
Strategists and opposition researchers said a single post is unlikely to tank a campaign, unless it’s beyond the pale—although it’s getting hard to determine where the line actually is. Praise for Nazism might have been considered an obvious deal-breaker, but Vice President J.D. Vance waved away the leaked texts from Young Republicans, comparing them to a “college group chat.”
Instead, a candidate’s continual behavior and character will likely inform voters—although a particularly egregious post could serve as a nail in the coffin.
“You have to say something really, really tough for it to truly break through,” said Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist and opposition researcher.
It’s not yet clear whether Jones will win his race to become Virginia’s attorney general or whether Platner will win the Senate primary in Maine. Ingrassia withdrew from consideration, and several members of the Young Republican organization implicated in the text scandal lost their jobs.
Last cycle, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign went down in flames after CNN released an investigation showing Robinson called himself “a black Nazi” on a pornography site’s message board and supported the return of slavery. Robinson had previously made a host of controversial remarks, including mocking school-shooting survivors and saying abortion is “about killing the child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
In many ways, digital scandals are no different from the average opposition-research-fueled political scandal. Candidates have come under fire for incendiary articles they wrote in their college newspapers for decades.
“Letters and pamphlets and things have been leaked since there was a printing press,” said Melissa Ryan, a Democratic consultant who focuses on combating disinformation.
Digital scandals, too, have popped up for nearly as long as the internet has existed.
“The difference between a college newspaper and Reddit, or whatever Mark Robinson was posting on, is [that] you can post, you can write a lot more stuff,” American Bridge 21st Century President Pat Dennis said. “In a lot of ways, the very difficult problem of an oppo researcher these days is figuring out how to read through 30,000 posts on Twitter.”
Don’t put anything in writing that you don’t want on the front page of the paper in your entire life. ”
—OnMessage co-founder Brad Todd
President Trump, too, lowered the standard for what is acceptable for political figures to post. During his first campaign, Republicans admonished him for his comments in an Access Hollywood tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.”
But since winning the presidency, Trump has continued the drumbeat of controversial statements, recently posting an AI-generated video of himself in a fighter jet dropping what appears to be feces on No Kings protesters.
Newer candidates will face more of an uphill battle when addressing controversial posts. For instance, voters have a very large bank of information to decide how they feel about Trump, so any individual incident is less potent. For a political newcomer, the only information voters may have about them may be an old post that came to light, leaving a campaign little room to change voters’ impressions.
“Don’t put anything in writing that you don’t want on the front page of the paper in your entire life,” OnMessage co-founder Brad Todd said. “We have an entire generation of young people now who have lived their entire life online, and they’re going to pay a price for it.”
But if up-and-coming candidates can avoid scrutiny for their past social media posts, an online presence can lend them a sense of authenticity and give them a leg up in a primary.
“In the attention economy, having a large online following overall should be a net benefit to running for office, because people know who you are and you’re a practiced communicator,” Ryan said.
In a primary, the real concern may be that a candidate is not electable based on controversial past statements—not just actual offense taken because of those statements.
“It’s not like people are more worried about making sure everybody was politically correct online, but they’re more worried about what it will say to the other voters if they nominate a candidate who wasn’t politically correct online,” Dennis said.
The age of questionable posts matters, to an extent. Recent texts being leaked may be more impactful than an insensitive post made a decade ago. But if candidates hope to flex their past accomplishments as a reason they are qualified for political office, they also need to answer for past insensitive comments, Todd said.
Much of the work to prevent digital scandals has to take place at the campaign level. Campaigns typically vet the candidate to get ahead of any opposition research that may come up on the trail, and the work of vetting increasingly includes looking at a candidate’s online history.
“You need to know if you said something problematic, so that you can be prepared to talk about it,” Democratic strategist Mike Nellis said.
A candidate’s reaction to past unsavory comments being leveled against them can be telling.
“There’s also more opportunity for candidates to talk about their online history, talk about their evolution of views, whatever narrative they want to create around that,” Ryan said.
Still, in spite of the extremely online lives of many young people today, political strategists and opposition researchers suspect the current trend of regrettable posts could be confined to millennials and Gen Z, who had less knowledge of the internet and its permanent memory when they were growing up.
“The next generation of kids is going to be more careful,” Todd said.
