When politicians become embroiled in scandal, parties are quick to portray such incidents as individual wrongdoing. But how effective is this strategy? To answer this question, we analyze the electoral repercussions of a recent political scandal in Germany: Several MPs in the national parliament of the then governing party, CDU/CSU, became publicly known to have been implicated in corrupt behavior. Leveraging the fact that the scandal surfaced shortly before state elections in two German states, we can show that the scandal damaged the whole CDU/CSU party brand, even though these elections were held at a different level of government and one state had no implicated MPs. We estimate the causal effect of the scandal, a loss of 4\%-points to the party, through a difference-in-differences design -- by differentiating trends in pre-scandal postal and post-scandal urn voting. We further investigate the mechanisms driving this effect with individual-level data -- by drawing on an unexpected event during survey design.