Last Friday, when Democratic Representative Haley Stevens’s last-ditch efforts to undermine Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign had yet to escalate from merely annoying to “despicable,” El-Sayed treated the sideshow as yet another opportunity to showcase his impressive message discipline and reiterate his closing argument to Michiganders. “Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago,” El-Sayed, who defeated Stevens for the Democratic nomination for Senate, wrote in a statement. “Let’s all focus on the task at hand: that’s beating [Republican nominee] Mike Rogers, holding Trump accountable, and getting money out of politics, putting money in pockets, and passing Medicare for All.”
Accountability, affordability, a dash of health care—those have been the core pillars of the Democrats’ message this year. But the overarching story they’ve been telling voters can be summed up in one word: corruption.
This corruption comes in many forms. There’s President Trump’s massive wealth, which has increased exponentially since he returned to office last January. In an ad for Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, a former supporter of GOP Senator Susan Collins accused her of “enriching herself while voting with Trump to raise our costs,” a reference to an FBI bribery probe of Collins that Trump shut down. Texas state Representative Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for governor, blamed skyrocketing costs on Governor Greg Abbott’s support for data centers and no-bid contracts for his donors. “It’s the Greg Abbott corruption tax,” she said at a recent event, “and we all pay it.” In Georgia, Jon Ossoff has campaigned on reining in Trump and what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago mafia,” an inner circle including Trump’s adult children, their spouses, and the cabal of aides and enablers that surround him.
More than 500 ads this cycle have focused on the president’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein, including one in which James Talarico, Texas’s Democratic nominee for Senate, asks why his opponent, Republican Ken Paxton, is ignoring Epstein survivors. “When did pedophilia become a partisan issue?” Talarico asks, appearing alongside one of those survivors. “When did holding sexual abusers accountable become controversial?”
Corruption may also play a crucial role in turning deep-red districts blue. It’s an issue that allows some Democrats to hit back against Republicans without invoking Trump himself in areas he won by as many as 20 points just two years ago. “They don’t want to look kind of like overt partisans, just framing this issue around Trump,” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett said on MS NOW in September. “In a Trump plus-15, Trump plus-20 district, that may look like taking on corruption across the board. In a plus-one seat, that may just look like taking on Trump directly and calling out his corruption specifically.” Denouncing a “broken” or “rigged” system allows Democrats to do just that—while also sounding a bit like the president himself.
That gets at another problem for Republicans: They can’t run the way they did in 2024, when Trump and his allies argued that prices were high because President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were too focused on identity issues—particularly trans rights—to curb inflation. Republicans are once again pouring hundreds of millions into anti-trans messaging, but that’s more or less all that they have. They can’t promise to bring prices down because prices have skyrocketed under Trump, particularly since he foolishly launched a war against Iran in late February. “If Democrats like Hinojosa have managed to turn the election into a referendum on corruption,” Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy wrote in a sharp piece about what has become the corruption election, “it’s also because Republicans have struggled to make the election about anything else.”
Trump has made it easier for them, though. Referring to the high cost of oil and gas at a rally last month, he shrugged off concerns. “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it,” he said. “We’re making a freaking fortune.” On Monday, he held a rambling final get-out-the-vote rally at the Reflecting Pool—site of a botched multimillion-dollar renovation—and mused he would name it after himself.
It’s no surprise, then, that corruption is a bipartisan issue. Almost 90 percent of Americans think corruption in politics is widespread, according to a September Gallup poll. “Allegations of corruption in Washington are nothing new in political campaigns. They are usually shrugged off by voters who figure all politicians are equally guilty,” The New York Times reported on Saturday, adding, “But Democratic efforts to bolster the issue this year may be resonating amid a drumbeat of stories about Mr. Trump’s staggering increase in wealth and the billionaire and corporate elites who have supported him. Some recent polls have shown corruption has risen to the top of issues that voters say they care about most.”
A Brennan Center study released last week found sharp increases in political ads focusing on government ethics and campaign spending. Republicans are airing these ads too, albeit with less success. But if there’s a warning here for Democrats, it’s that voters think the entire political system is corrupt—which implicates Democrats just as much as Republicans. Even though the current Republican president is overseeing the most crooked, self-enriching administration in U.S. history, many voters see this as a bipartisan problem and likely will be quick to accuse the next Democratic president of being corrupt, as well.
But massive Democratic gains in November can—and should—be part of a larger push for good government, especially as some memories of Democratic malfeasance (Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades, the handling of Joe Biden’s age) begin to fade. Not only that, but if they can win back control of at least one chamber of Congress, the Democrats can expose Republican corruption in ways that were not possible before. Out of power in both the House and the Senate, Democrats have been unable to launch investigations, subpoena witnesses, or hold public hearings. They’ll be able to do all of that come January if they win back the House.
If the Democrats get there, it will be because they hammered Republicans on corruption. If El-Sayed wins on Tuesday, he’ll become the first Muslim elected to the Senate. That will be the headline, and rightly so. But the story about how he won will be quite different: Despite Haley Stevens’s best efforts to sabotage El-Sayed, he remained laser-focused on the midterms’ most important issue.
