American voters spoke up in the primaries recently, choosing to out incumbents for more anti-establishment candidates, such as Tea Party conservative Rand Paul in Kentucky. The upset reflects a shift to the left among Democratic voters, and an apparent disillusion among Republican voters who feel their candidates aren’t as conservative as they’d like.

The primaries in four states were held under the shadow of recent scandals involving senators Mark Souder (R) who resigned over an admitted affair with a married staffer, and Eric Massa (D) who fell under fire for allegedly sexually harassing male staffers. And the number of sex scandals is increasing, thanks to “new technology [and] new press standards,” according to The Daily Beast. Their study, examining the 59 top-ranked sex scandals in the last 20 years, found that Democrats get the bigger more serious scandals, Republicans win with more sex scandals overall.

With so many gay sex scandals from anti-gay political incumbents, and so may adulterous situations with “family values” politicians, it’s a clear signal that a sexually repressive culture yields less-than-chaste results. So, as new candidate potential Rand Paul is apparently “so conservative he scares Dick Cheney,” it looks like 2012 is going to be an interesting year.