Cal Cunningham isn’t the first Democratic candidate from NC caught up in a sex scandal
A North Carolina Democrat was running for office when the headlines broke in October: Candidate embroiled in sex scandal.
The year was 2007. The candidate, John Edwards, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who was running for president.
The story by the National Enquirer recounted his affair with a former campaign staffer. Edwards denied it on a sunny morning outside a barbecue restaurant in South Carolina.
Now another North Carolina Democrat, Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, has found himself caught up in his own sex scandal.
On Friday night his campaign acknowledged that he’d sent text messages of a sexual nature to a California woman. Cunningham is married and the father of two. The texts were first reported by the National File, a site that bills itself as publishing news of interest to the New Right.
It’s unclear exactly what Cunningham’s relationship is with Arlene Guzman Todd, a public relations strategist from California. Or what the impact of the revelation will be on a race that could decide which party controls the Senate.
Edwards went on to run in the 2008 primary against fellow Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Not until August 2008 did he acknowledge having had a long-running affair with Rielle Hunter, though he denied an Enquirer report that he’d fathered her child. He would not acknowledge that until much later.
“John Edwards’ political career clearly collapsed after that,” Ferrel Guillory, founder of the Program on Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill, told the Observer Saturday.
Aside from the scandalous headlines, the two cases are very different. Where Edwards tried to cover up the affair, and the child that came of it, for months, Cunningham acknowledged his own indiscretion early.
“Obviously a big difference is in Edwards’ case there was a child and he had denied that he was the father,” said Gary Pearce, a longtime Democratic consultant. “There’s a big difference between exchanging text messages and fathering a child and then denying it.”
Whitney Ross Manzo, a political scientist at Meredith College, said unlike Edwards, Cunningham did not deny the reports.
“It’s a point in Cunningham’s favor that he admitted it right away and apologized right way without trying any kind of coverup,” she said.
And then there’s the 2020 environment. Americans have seen many sex scandals.
Many voters forgave President Donald Trump for his broadcast comments on the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, when he admitted to grabbing women by their private parts. The president has been accused of sexual affairs by multiple women and allegedly paid a settlement to porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence.
“Times have changed,” Manzo said, “when you have the president being caught having an affair with a porn star and paying her off. What Cunningham did seems almost quaint in comparison.”
But political scientist Susan Roberts of Davidson College said, “Trump is an anomaly in terms of how much he can get away with and how Teflon he is with this.”
She said she believes the votes of suburban women, a group targeted by all candidates this year, will be driven more by the presidential race than anything else, including the Cunningham revelations.
Guillory wonders if there’s a higher level of tolerance.
“Throughout history we have a long chain of prominent leaders, including presidents, who have had extramarital relationships and somehow survived,” he said.
Manzo, who’s 34, said sexting isn’t that big an offense to her generation of millennials.
“I’m not saying he made a good decision here, he did not,” she said. “(But) it’s more scandalous for people who haven’t grown up texting....
“In the grand scheme of everything going on in 2020, this is a low saliency issue.”
This story was originally published October 3, 2020 at 3:12 PM.
