Corruption is the sleeper issue of the 2026 midterms

Corruption Is Coming for the Midterms

I just came out of the field with a new poll of Latino voters in California. Barely forty-eight hours old. And for the first time in a decade of tracking this community, corruption is showing up almost as important as cost of living and affordability.

That’s right. Corruption is right behind the economy and way ahead of immigration as an issue.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen it in my polling in the past week or so.

In fact, I tweeted about it at the end of July. Take a look if you need receipts…

Here’s more when I was on The Left Hook with Waj Ali:

youtube.com/shorts/PEwzIdeEXJo?si=Vq0U4btvBDVWT9H4

Corruption and fraud in government is almost as important as cost of living. Let that sit for a minute.

Here’s the poll result. Again this was a California survey of Latino voters I conducted with one of the most prominent Democratic pollsters in the country just a few days ago:

That’s a big deal folks.

For ten years, every poll I have run has told the same story. Latino voters care about the price of gas, the price of eggs, the rent. Corruption was background noise, an abstraction for people worried about making the next car payment.

That has changed.

If you think this is a California problem, or a Latino problem, look at the stage in Atlanta where Jon Ossoff stood and called Donald Trump a crook. Look at Texas, where James Talarico is planting yard signs that read Corruption Is Costing Texans.

A Democrat in a red state does not run on corruption because it polls badly. He runs on it because his polling numbers, like mine, are telling him something is moving.

A Tik Tok post from Talarico’s campaign using AI imagery of Ken Paxton as a corrupt Texas politicians has garnered well over 2 million views.

The American voter is starting to connect the dots. The Epstein files. The cryptocurrency schemes. The Trump family taking money from Saudi royals. The Qatari plane, maybe the most brazen example of the bunch. None of this used to register as an economic issue. It was scandal, tabloid material, something for cable news to chew on for a news cycle. Voters filed it under corruption and filed corruption under things that happen in Washington, far away from their own kitchen table.

That wall is coming down.

Voters are starting to fuse the corruption story to the affordability story. They are starting to believe the second causes the first, that the money flowing to Trump and his family and his allies is money that should have gone somewhere else. Into their paycheck. Into their grocery budget. Into their rent.

Watch what comes next. Democratic campaigns across the country are going to start drawing a straight line between Trump’s corruption, the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party that enables it, and the economic pain ordinary families are living through every day.

Not as two separate messages anymore.

One message.