Corruption on the Ballot
Sarah Chamberlain, the president and C.E.O. of the Republican Main Street Partnership, was observing a focus group of MAGA voters in Colorado in late August when she first started to hear a surge of complaints about government corruption. Chamberlain’s organization is dedicated to electing House Republicans—it began with a moderate orientation but has been adjusting to the new world of Trump voters—and she was in the state to help insure that the MAGA faithful would turn out in close races. At that meeting of voters and at subsequent ones, Chamberlain recalled, “we didn’t prompt them. It just came up.” She added, “They are tired of watching their members of Congress get wealthy, and they’re struggling to fill their gas tanks.”
The polls would soon reflect the same angry sentiment, across the ideological spectrum. Most strikingly, a Fox News poll released in mid-October found that “corruption in government” was voters’ top concern—above inflation, gas prices, and health care. Eighty-eight per cent said that they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about it. Corruption “has steadily gained in importance on the list of the most critical issues facing the country,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said. “I never remember corruption as an issue being as important as it is now.”
Corruption is always a tempting message for the party out of power. Donald Trump used that playbook in 2016, vowing to drain the Washington swamp. Bemoaning corruption is risk-free: no voters are in favor of it, even if they have differing interpretations of what the term entails. In the meantime, hitting corruption lets the opposition party duck the harder tasks of producing a detailed legislative agenda. But, in this cycle, what could catapult the issue from a topic of chronic bellyaching to an actual mechanism for changing votes is the gloomy economic climate. Voters who are feeling flush may be willing to tolerate a degree of self-dealing from politicians that becomes insupportable when grocery bills are high. Corruption “is always a useful word, but it’s more effective at some times than others,” Robert Boatright, a political-science professor at Clark University and the co-author of the 2025 book “American Corruption Talk,” noted. “It’s a way to put your finger on people’s general dissatisfaction with our politicians, with our economy, with the state of the world.”
Then, there is the matter of President Trump. Chamberlain said that Trump did not come up in her focus groups, though participants did cite Donald, Jr.,’s oligarch-financed post-wedding festivities, along with stock trading by the husband of the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—this was a maga crowd, after all. But it doesn’t take much to imagine that the swirl of self-dealing around Trump—the Qatari jet gifted for the President’s use; the millions paid to Melania Trump’s production company for her documentary; a billion-plus in crypto profits that flowed into the family coffers—contributed to the fury. Indeed, in a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll released on October 18th, sixty-six per cent of voters said that they believed Trump was using the Presidency for personal gain, up from fifty-six per cent a year earlier. Ominously for Republicans, the shift came largely from G.O.P. voters and Republican-leaning independents.
Even with an already cynical electorate, the toll is measurable. In September, Gallup found that Americans’ perception of corruption in government was at its highest level in two decades of polling; eighty-nine per cent said that it is widespread, up ten percentage points from a year earlier. And the blame is not spread evenly. In an A.P.-NORC poll from September, forty-nine per cent of respondents said that the word “corrupt” describes Republicans extremely or very well; just thirty-seven per cent took that view of Democrats.
Little wonder, then, that Democrats have jumped on the issue. According to the tracking firm AdImpact, Democrats have spent a hundred and eighty-two million dollars this year on corruption-focussed advertising in House and Senate races—far more than Republicans have and more than Democrats did during the previous four elections combined. Their strategy is not simply to highlight corruption but to link it to economic consequences. As a September memo from the Senate Majority PAC, the main super PAC backing Senate Democrats, advised, “The strongest reason to vote against a Republican continues to be that they have raised our costs; do not sacrifice the cost piece in favor of communicating about corruption alone, as corruption charges that are not anchored to costs do not clear the bar.” Hence an ad run against Michael Whatley, the G.O.P. candidate for an open Senate seat in North Carolina: “He got rich lobbying for Big Oil, while they jacked up prices on you.”
In the Maine Senate race, Democrats have launched a three-million-dollar ad buy, seizing on a report by ProPublica about an F.B.I. investigation, which was shut down last year, into whether Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, had accepted illegal contributions from a defense contractor. (Collins has denied any wrongdoing.) “Maybe there’s a reason Susan Collins does anything Donald Trump wants her to,” a woman who looks like she’s straight out of an L. L. Bean catalogue says to the camera. Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist working with the Senate Majority PAC, said that the two points—Collins’s support for Trump and her alleged ethical lapses—are intertwined. “If we only did the Trump without the other, I don’t think we would have as good a chance of defeating her as we do,” Garin said.
Nowhere, however, is spending on corruption ads greater—or the volume louder—than in the Texas Senate race, between the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, and the state representative James Talarico. Paxton’s Republican-primary opponent, Senator John Cornyn, paved the way with commercials that urged, “Defeat the crook,” citing, among other things, Paxton’s pocketing of a fellow-lawyer’s thousand-dollar Montblanc pen. (A spokesperson has said that Paxton took the pen by “mistake.”) Talarico has called Paxton “everything that’s wrong with this broken, corrupt political system.” In a formulation used by other Democratic candidates, he told voters, “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” As a matter of pure economics, this linkage may be debatable. But, in a sour season, it could be enough to secure Democratic wins. ♦