Honesty isn’t what it used to be either. In 2007, an Associated Press / Yahoo! poll found 71 percent of Republicans saying it was “extremely important” for presidential candidates to be honest, similar to 70 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents.22 A 2018 Washington Post poll showed identical shares of Democrats and independents prioritizing honesty in presidential candidates, but the share of Republicans who said honesty was extremely important had fallen to 49 percent,23 22 points lower than in the AP / Yahoo! poll from the pre-Trump era.
