He doesn’t need to be clean or honest to get my vote.
But he needs to be vindicated before he can be the national player in the Senate we need him to be.
If we say “he may be a scumbag, but he’s our scumbag, so let’s vote for him,” we are just throwing more trash on his reputation. We’re serving Mitch. We ought not concede his guilt in these matters.
No one is conceding guilt, it just isn’t relevant to anything.