Last week, J.D. Vance gave a speech at a factory in Des Moines, Iowa, that ostensibly was in support of GOP Rep. Zach Nunn’s reelection campaign, but rightly has been evaluated as a trial balloon for his all-but-declared 2028 presidential run. And its message should worry Democrats who are expecting to ride an anti-Trump wave back to power this fall and beyond.
The vice president said the November midterms would come down to one big issue. “It’s fundamentally, do you want people in Washington, D.C., who fight for you, who fight for the people of this district, or who fight for corruption and fraud?” he said.
It might seems surprising, given President Trump’s rampant and ever-expanding corruption, that Republicans think this is a winning issue for them. But much anti-corruption messaging depends on how voters define corruption and who they think is responsible for it. Republicans for years have been pointing fingers at the poor, people of color, urban residents, “welfare queens,” and immigrants. Vance stuck to that message in Iowa because it resonates with rural voters and the kind of persuadable voters the Democratic Party needs to win back. So the Democrats have work to do in redirecting anger over political corruption toward other, more credible targets that will also resonate with these voters.
To lay out his case that Democrats are the corrupt ones, Vance recalled February’s State of the Union speech, in which Trump asked the politicians in the chamber to stand if they agreed that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Vance said in Iowa that no Democrats stood. “They didn’t care about you. They didn’t care about the people of this district. They didn’t care about the farmers or the factory workers or the people who actually make this country run,” he said. “Because now we have, in Washington D.C., a Democrat Party that is so focused on illegal immigration, that is so focused on people who don’t have the legal right to be here, that is so focused on fraud because so many of their friends get rich from fraud that they forgot to look after you.”
Vance defined fraud as people misusing government programs, and related false stories of “Somalian fraudsters” using programs they weren’t eligible for. “We had let fraud become so rampant in this country that people were able to get rich, not by creating something amazing, not by employing something, not by building something beautiful with their hands,” he continued. “They were able to get rich by defrauding every single person in this room. And they were taking money that should go to America’s low-income families, to America’s elderly, to people who are struggling in our communities. They were stealing it out of their pocket and stealing it out of your pocket so they could get rich.”
This is not true, of course, but it draws on some beliefs many key voters already have. United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, an organizing group that works in the Inter-Mountain-West region, has been conducting a rural listening tour and released findings last month that show why this could be effective messaging in many parts of the country. In focus groups and conversations, according to the report, “Concerns about corruption and self-enrichment were among the most consistent points of agreement across participants in our research.” And these rural residents said Republicans and Democrats alike were guilty of it. “There’s a deep, deep anger towards both political parties, and political institutions generally,” said David Dodge, who leads the project.
But here’s the rub: 58 percent of them said Democrats were the most corrupt, versus 47 percent who said the same about Republicans.
Interestingly, despite their anger at politicians and the U.S. government today, these people also expressed faith in the idea of American government more generally. “Even though they are deeply distrustful of the system working as it should, there was really strong support for our Constitution,” Dodge said. “It is this founding document that can get us out of the darkness that we’ve kind of found ourselves in.”
This suggests that voters might put faith in politicians who make appeals to constitutional ideals and a deep-seated sense of American identity—which perhaps was Vance’s intent with his nativist comments in Iowa. The idea the real corruption in America is among everyday people applying for and using taxpayer-funded programs is widely believed in rural communities but also in many communities across the country. When the progressive group Way to Win tested messages on corruption in surveys with voters in key Sun Belt states, it found that messages about government fraud and overspending outperformed messages about campaign finance and other reforms.
Vance’s focus on the midterms as an election that will fight “corruption” shows that Republicans continue to realize something about rural voters and swing voters that Democrats don’t: Just because voters are unhappy with Trump doesn’t mean they’ll actually vote for Democrats. The deep mistrust in what the government is doing and who it supports can be directed wherever politicians are willing to point, and politicians who are in favor of government spending and government programs are vulnerable to the charge that they’re up to no good. Vance, who has presented himself as an avatar of rural, blue-collar voters, understands that people who feel like they work hard and struggle to get ahead are eager to find villains, and that a skilled politician can direct their frustration more easily than the truth can.
Some Democrats are working to counter Vance’s distorted message. In his Georgia re-election campaign, Senator Jon Ossoff has described the corruption of the Trump administration in relatable terms, accusing the president and his family of raking in billions “from foreign princes” while “rent, power, groceries and healthcare have all hit all-time highs this year,” as he said at an event in Augusta last month. “While you pay more for everything, the first family’s wealth is growing by billions of dollars—because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.”
Trump’s corruption has also become a focus in the House, and many congressional Democrats have signed a pledge to support campaign finance reforms to keep big money out of politics and ban members of Congress from trading stocks while in office. They’ve also launched an Anti-Corruption and Democracy Reform Task Force, which isn’t likely to inspire voters who are wary of the federal government’s effectiveness.
To be successful, Democratic candidates will need to tell voters a compelling story, as Ossoff does, connecting corruption to some of the hardships American families are facing. It also might require Democrats to embrace some policies elected officials don’t like, like term limits, and supporting challengers who attack the establishment. “It’s not going to be enough to just say Republicans are bad on corruption, or Trump is bad on corruption,” Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, the group that organized the pledge, told HuffPost earlier this month. “We need to have a much more proactive message.”
