With Democrats looking toward the 2026 midterm elections, they are pushing an anti-corruption agenda in hopes of persuading voters. The party has called for laws against corruption to be placed on the books and repeatedly accused President Donald Trump of corrupt practices. Democrats are hoping this strategy, coupled with Trump’s plunging approval ratings, can help them win in November.
Democrats unveiled an anti-corruption task force in their attempts to “claw back control of Congress from Republicans,” said The Associated Press. The task force will look to “overhaul ethics rules and protect access to the ballot.” Democrats aim to implement the same playbook used in Hungary against former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who “was ousted by an opposition campaign with an anti-corruption message.”
The New Democrat Coalition, a caucus of 115 moderate House Democrats, has also released a plan to “crack down on loopholes that could assist insider trading, prediction-market schemes and cryptocurrency scams that any members of Congress or officials in the Trump administration engage in, including the president,” said NOTUS. Insider trading is already illegal, but “there is a growing concern among both parties that some members are profiting off their jobs.” Democrats are hoping the anti-corruption effort will “earn the trust of Americans” ahead of the election.
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Democrats are also arguing that they care more about weeding out corruption than Republicans. Democratic officials have noted in campaigns that FBI Director Kash Patel “dismantled the agency’s public corruption team, which had previously been deployed to help monitor possible criminal activity,” said ProPublica. Over 200 Democrats have additionally aligned themselves with the End Citizens United PAC, which commits to “rejecting corporate PAC money, supporting a ban on congressional stock trading and working to end dark money in politics.”
What next?
Despite Democrats having a unified message around anti-corruption practices, voters in “battleground districts still do not give Democrats any advantage over the GOP when it comes to cleaning up corruption in the capital, showing how difficult it might be for the party to break through on the issue,” said the HuffPost. The End Citizens United PAC has urged candidates to “use anti-corruption arguments to underscore Democrats’ near-universal messages about affordability,” arguing that this will push them over the edge in November.
Some have cited Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) as an example of a politician successfully running an anti-corruption platform. “Nobody is articulating this kind of frame better than he is doing right now,” Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, said to HuffPost. But “gaining an advantage on the issue may require heading into territory some Democrats are uncomfortable with,” such as supporting “anti-corruption ideas more typically favored by the right, including term limits.”
If the Democrats win in the midterms, Trump’s “brand of corruption” will begin to wane in November and “go away in three years,” Ian Bremmer, the president of the global consultancy firm Eurasia Group, said to Semafor. The president is “putting his own best interest, and his family’s interests and his inner circle’s interest above those of the country,” Bremmer added. “Some of that is vainglorious.”
