Voters Are Furious About Corruption

As Election Day closes in on us, a lot of fascinating poll results are flying around. But as a longtime political corruption reporter, I’ve found myself particularly intrigued by the numbers showing how Americans feel about the out-of-control graft in Washington, DC. To be brief: Voters are very concerned. And not just a bare majority. Nearly everyone is worried about corruption—roughly 90 percent of respondents in multiple surveys.

Plenty of news has been feeding voter anxieties lately. There’s the hundreds of millions of dollars Donald Trump has apparently earned in crypto deals, including selling a stake of his crypto firm to the national security adviser (and brother to the leader) of the United Arab Emirates. The president has solicited corporate and oligarch money for his pet building projects, and his adult children have mingled their own financial interests with America’s global priorities.

During Trump’s first administration, government ethics experts explained how he was crossing lines no president had ever before crossed. This term, they’ve run out of synonyms for “unprecedented.”

The big question is: Will it actually matter in the voting booth? And, to be brief again: It actually might.

The reason for skepticism is simple. For decades, Americans of all political stripes have complained about “corruption” or the role of money in politics, but it rarely translates to political action. After all, when was the last time you felt like you could really trust politicians or that they weren’t taking campaign cash from the wrong people? In most election years, voters are simply more interested in issues like the economy or foreign wars.

So what might be different this time around? Recent research suggests that concerns over corruption are no longer simply competing for voter attention with bread-and-butter issues. Instead, voters have begun to see corruption as inextricably linked to the the problems they face.

CNN reported this week that in a recent GOP focus group in the Midwest, voters expressed concern over high gas prices—nothing surprising about that. But when asked who they blamed, the voters’ responses were surprising: “corrupt politicians” and “billionaires.” Those responses, in a part of the country Trump won in 2024, apparently alarmed the pollsters.

That focus group isn’t alone in its findings.

Back in May, a Brennan Center poll found 92 percent people, of all political affiliations, believe corruption is a major problem in politics. Those respondents had pretty broad and varying definitions of what “corruption” means. But almost everyone agreed that politicians using their offices for personal gain, or putting the interests of billionaires and big corporations over the interests of voters, qualified. And, just like the participants in the GOP focus group, 79 percent of the Brennan Center respondents felt that corruption was getting in the way of the government’s solving everyday problems.

In September, a Gallup poll found quite similar results—89 percent of respondents thought that corruption was “widespread” in the government. Those figures seem to match a more recent Gallup poll that shows the public’s trust in the government’s ability to handle big problems is at an all-time low.

Piling on, a recent Fox News poll found that 88 percent of Americans are extremely or very concerned about corruption. Notably, that number is higher than the portion of Americans who said they were concerned about inflation or gas prices, healthcare or the war in Iran.

An underlying current in all the polling is that people are worried about corruption across the government, with Congress being held in particularly low regard. And voters don’t seem to be inclined to let Democrats off the hook. Trump has worked tirelessly—and often dishonestly—to link his opponents to corruption, and his efforts have been often been successful. The Brennan Center poll found that most people thought the Supreme Court and the last two presidents were corrupt.

That said, what really stands out is that all of this is unusual—which is potentially a good sign for Democrats. Voters who are mad at the government aren’t likely to favor the incumbents.