{"id":5576,"date":"2026-08-30T21:36:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T21:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=5576"},"modified":"2026-08-30T21:36:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T21:36:27","slug":"democrats-are-weaponizing-an-everyday-word-to-quietly-reshape-the-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=5576","title":{"rendered":"Democrats are weaponizing an everyday word to quietly reshape the midterms"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have seen campaign ads for the midterm elections, you have likely noticed that a major theme this year is corruption.<\/p>

Read more The real reason Trump won again \u2014and why his power is waning<\/a><\/p>

New Hampshire congressman and Senate candidate Chris Pappas has framed his campaign around his anti-corruption efforts in Congress, claiming that his anti-corruption record includes the fact that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t take a dime of corporate PAC money,\u201d opposes congressional stock trading, and wants to ban companies from using AI to set prices based on Americans\u2019 personal data. <\/p>

A super PAC allied with Pappas\u2019 prospective Republican opponent, John Sununu, has run ads calling Pappas corrupt, alleging that Pappas \u201cserves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role.\u201d <\/p>

This is one of many races where corruption has a prime role. On her DCinbox Substack, which tracks \u201chow members of Congress communicate with constituents,\u201d Lindsey Cormack shows that Democrats this year are talking about corruption six times as much as they did in 2022 and four times as much as Republicans have this year in their emails to constituents. This suggests that the corruption talk is a part of Democratic Party strategy. <\/p>

Why? <\/p>

One possibility might be that there is a lot of corruption happening. Yet a puzzling feature of these advertisements is that few of them mention President Donald Trump, despite plentiful allegations of corrupt acts by Trump and members of his administration. <\/p>

Another might be that the public is particularly concerned about corruption. Research shows, however, that the public is always a little bit concerned about corruption, and that these worries often do not correspond with particular actions by politicians.<\/p>

So what is going on, then? <\/p>

The talk, it turns out, is not really about specific, identifiable corruption. It\u2019s about delegitimizing your opponent.<\/p>

Choice of those out of power<\/h2>

My recent book, \u201cAmerican Corruption Talk,\u201d co-authored with Molly Brigid McGrath, analyzes the prevalence of what we call \u201ccorruption talk\u201d by presidents and presidential candidates since the nation\u2019s founding. We argue that corruption talk is different from talk about real corruption \u2013 many Americans identify things as being corrupt even when they do not meet the textbook definition of corruption. <\/p>

In our book, we identify three types of corruption:<\/p>

\u2022 Transactional corruption is inherent in particular acts \u2013 offering or accepting a bribe, for instance. <\/p>

\u2022 Moral corruption is being a rotten person \u2013 someone who is corrupt is not trustworthy, even if we cannot identify anything specific that person has done wrong. <\/p>

\u2022 Systemic corruption has to do with the government\u2019s behavior itself. It is not a matter of bad people but bad institutions.<\/p>

Corruption talk blurs the distinctions between these three distinct things. <\/p>

In the book, we explore changes over time in how presidents, presidential candidates and party platforms discuss corruption. <\/p>

We found that parties out of power talk much more about corruption than those who are in power. Corruption talk is popular among politicians who want to avoid taking strong ideological positions or tying themselves closely to their party leaders. They can use it as evidence of bipartisanship, as a way to say they are not career politicians, or to emphasize their competence and integrity.<\/p>

Corruption is what political scientists call a valence issue \u2013 almost everyone thinks corruption is bad, but not everyone agrees about how much of it there is. <\/p>

Read more Trump cuts down oldest cherry blossoms in DC for his golf course<\/a><\/p>

Corruption talk, it turns out, is useful for bringing together parties or candidates who want to avoid talking about divisive issues. It is also a way to delegitimize the opposition. If one\u2019s opponents are corrupt, it doesn\u2019t matter what they say. They\u2019re the kind of people who would do corrupt things, even if they haven\u2019t done them yet.<\/p>

Democrats avoid division<\/h2>

The Democrats\u2019 corruption talk of 2026 checks all of these boxes. <\/p>

Democrats have internal divisions, from political ideology to policy on Israel, which they may wish to avoid talking about. <\/p>

Talking about things Trump has done requires too much explanation \u2013 it\u2019s hard to describe the Constitution\u2019s foreign emoluments clause in a 30-second ad. That clause bars the president from accepting \u201c\u2018any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever\u2019 from a foreign government unless Congress consents,\u201d and Trump has been accused of violating it. <\/p>

But talking about corruption in a moral or systemic sense \u2013 observing that the country is in decline, or that elites are out of touch \u2013 can be effective.<\/p>

\u201cTo every Utahn tired of chaos and corruption, there\u2019s a place for you on this campaign,\u201d Ben McAdams, a former Democratic congressman from Utah and current candidate for the House, declared in a July 2026 Instagram post.<\/p>

So talking about corruption is a way to talk about Trump and the Trump administration without mentioning them directly. Voters unhappy with Trump will assume corruption talk is an indictment of Trump, while Trump supporters may assume the corruption is elsewhere \u2013 after all, Trump won the 2016 election, in part, by promising to take on the corrupt establishment. <\/p>

These distinctions \u2013 real corruption vs. corruption talk \u2013 go back at least to the country\u2019s founding, if not beyond. Historically, corruption talk has stood in for other things. <\/p>

For instance, the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when activists in both parties worked together to pursue reforms in government, economic policy and social policy, was the era in which we find that corruption talk was most prevalent in American politicians\u2019 rhetoric. It was also a moment when America was almost as polarized and economically unequal as it is today, and many Americans saw this inequality as a symptom of corruption.<\/p>

None of this is to deny that the U.S. currently has a president who has engaged in more overt acts of corruption than any other. Trump\u2019s actions \u2013 from his family\u2019s documented cryptocurrency profiteering to his appointment of a Cabinet full of conflicts of interest (such as stock ownership in companies regulated by their agencies, or a history of lobbying the very agencies they now run), to his alleged ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein \u2013 no doubt have catalyzed this discussion. <\/p>

Yet it is perhaps fitting that the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary has been characterized by a return to a classic American preoccupation: the traditional American pastime of corruption talk.\n

\"The<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Robert Boatright, Professor of Political Science, Clark University<\/em>; Institute for Humane Studies<\/em><\/p>

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.<\/p>

Read more Trump is staring down a familiar nightmare due to a household staple<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rather than diving into risky policy debates, political data reveals candidates are flooding voter feeds with a classic American pastime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDemocrats are weaponizing an everyday word to quietly reshape the midterms - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=5576\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Democrats are weaponizing an everyday word to quietly reshape the midterms - 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