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Two-thirds of Americans say Trump is a bad role model for children. That's still better than Bill Clinton

 Emily Guskin

By Emily Guskin The Washington Post

Published March 27, 2018

Two-thirds of Americans say Trump is a bad role model for children. That's still better than Bill Clinton

Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal and Summer Zervos's personal accusations against President Donald Trump have brought attention to his alleged dalliances and misdeeds, but through all of it, his standing as a role model for children has not budged - and continues to be better than President Bill Clinton's reputation in the late 1990s.


Just under 3 in 10 registered voters (29 percent) say Trump is a good role model for children, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll; two-thirds say he's not (67 percent). That's exactly the same result as a January poll by the same university, and is also very similar to a July 2017 Washington Post-ABC News poll in which 30 percent of adults said he was a positive role model and 68 percent said he was not.


But even fewer Americans saw Clinton as a good role model for young people in the months after news of his affair with Monica Lewinsky came out. An August 1998 ABC News poll found 21 percent of Americans saying Clinton was a "positive role model for young people," eight points lower than the percentage of registered voters saying the same of Trump today.


What's behind the different views? The allegations against Trump and Clinton are quite different. Clinton was accused of having sexual relations with a White House intern in the Oval Office as well as other allegations of affairs and harassment before entering office.


Trump has been accused of sexually harassing many women, including a former employee, and also of having extramarital affairs before becoming president, including with an adult film star to whom a Trump lawyer allegedly paid $130,000 in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.


The polls point to another factor - Republicans are far more loyal to Trump on this question than Democrats were to Clinton two decades ago.


In 1998, Democrats were about half as likely to say their party's president was a good role model (31 percent) than Republicans are to say the same about Trump today (61 percent). Roughly similar shares of independents both then (22 percent) and now (28 percent) said Clinton and Trump are a good role model, respectively. Among the opposite party of the president, fewer than 10 percent said each was a positive role model in either year.

And there are notable differences when it comes to gender, too. When Clinton was president, 17 percent of men said he was a positive role model. About twice as many say the same about Trump today, 35 percent. Women's opinions of both presidents are very similar - 24 percent of women said Clinton was a positive role model; 23 percent say Trump is a good role model today.


Clinton's very poor image as a role model is also telling as far as how much a president's popularity can be hampered (or not) by personal scandals. Throughout 1998, when the scandal became public, his job approval rating never sank below 56 percent in Washington Post-ABC News polling, and he finished the year with 67 percent approving, buoyed by positive views of the economy.


For Trump, it's hard to know how much opinions about his personal relationships impact his overall popularity. But last summer's Post-ABC poll found Americans had similarly widespread doubts about Trump's role model bona fides before the emergence of Stormy Daniels and the beginning of the #MeToo movement, suggesting that they have yet to have a significant impact, at least on this question.


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