The McCain Lane

A laser-like focus on anti-corruption would be particularly well-timed for Democrats, considering that 2028 will be the conclusion of a scandal-plagued president’s second term — precisely the kind of moment when past anti-corruption crusades have found their greatest resonance.

In 1976, Georgia’s little-known Democratic governor Jimmy Carter won the presidency by casting himself as the squeaky-clean antidote to Watergate, pledging to combat influence-peddling in Washington, and promising to restore government ethics after “scandals and corruption have hit us like hammer blows.”

In the wake of Clinton-era fundraising scandals, Republican Sen. John McCain nearly wrested his party’s 2000 nomination away from big-money candidate George W. Bush by running as a maverick populist defying the advice of consultants, delivering “straight talk” about both parties’ corruption, and winning over disaffected independent voters.

“The opponents of campaign finance reform will tell you the voters, particularly Republican voters, don’t care about this issue — they are wrong,” McCain said. “Most Americans care very much that the Lincoln Bedroom has become a Motel Six, where the president of the United States serves as a bellhop.”

In 2008, Obama depicted McCain as an extension of the Bush administration’s two terms of pay-to-play government.

After Obama then spent two terms helping his bank donors turn “hope and change” into more of the same, Vermont’s independent senator Bernie Sanders (whom I once worked for) almost pulled off a stunning Democratic primary victory with a crusade against Citizens United and Wall Street’s political power.

Soon after, Trump campaigned in the general election as an anti-corruption populist touting an ethics reform plan and declaring that “public corruption is a grave and profound threat to a democracy” that “spreads outward, like a cancer, and infects the operations of government itself.”

In the last ABC News/Washington Post poll of that campaign, Trump was behind or tied on every major issue surveyed except one: corruption. He had built up a big lead in how people thought he would handle corruption and won the election.

The Political Risks and Rewards of Anti-Corruption

Of course, there are risks if Democrats go all in against corruption.

For instance, most Democratic politicians who adopt an anti-corruption platform are, in fact, swimming in the current corrupt system. Ossoff is an example: He was accused of letting his ownership stake in Apple influence his work on antitrust legislation. Meanwhile, after crypto donors funneled cash to Senate Democrats and spent opponents into the ground in 2024, Ossoff was among a group of Democrats who brushed off warnings from public interest groups and voted to fortify the cryptocurrency industry. This vote seems calibrated to avoid the ire of crypto donors who are now deciding whether to spend heavily against Ossoff in 2026.

For any Democrat like Ossoff now elevating anti-corruption, doesn’t that kind of behavior open them up to allegations of hypocrisy? Perhaps, but it’s also a humanizing opportunity to frankly admit their struggles and compromises inside an immoral and corrupt system. It helps if they can point to high-profile moments when they defied donor pressure (Ossoff can). And they can follow the examples of McCain and Trump.

The former had been singed by the Keating Five corruption scandal, but with the zeal of a convert, he cited his misadventures in the Washington swamp as a learning experience fueling his conviction. The latter insisted he knew the system was corrupt and needed to be fixed because he himself had bought politicians with campaign cash.

In both cases, the candidates turned what could have been seen as hypocrisy into proof of their authenticity.

There’s also the risk that Democratic voters are tribal and will reject Democratic candidates daring to implicate their own party in the corruption problem. But polls show Democratic voters are more enraged at their party leaders than at any time in recent memory, which should make a throw-the-bums-out message resonate both in the Democratic primaries and in general elections.

There’s also the possibility that while anti-corruption positions excite activists and eggheads on the wine track, it does not animate rank-and-file voters on the beer track. The risk here is that campaign finance and ethics reforms may end up being seen as a niche obsession of good-government types whose technocratic and process-oriented arguments often fail to explain how corruption materially harms workaday Americans.

But again, this communication challenge has been overcome before. In his 2008 campaign ads, Obama linked his corruption criticisms to the skyrocketing price of gas. Eight years later, Sanders overperformed in the Democratic primary by explaining the connection between corruption and the mortgage meltdown, high drug prices, and the climate crisis. Today Ossoff seems to be sounding the same notes.

“The corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions,” he said recently, echoing themes that first won him a Senate seat in his Republican-leaning state:

The corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. The corruption is why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood, and Congress doesn’t do anything about it. This is why so many have lost faith in our system: because the system really is rigged.

“Largely Absent From the Democratic Messaging”

Americans seem to be getting the message: in recent surveys, government corruption topped the list of voters’ biggest concerns, with a whopping 87 percent saying they are worried about the problem.

That does not mean Democrats are on a glide path. They must still enunciate how reducing the power of donors to buy elections and shape legislation will create the conditions not just for a momentary MAGA interregnum or more Democratic incrementalism but for large-scale policies that materially benefit voters.

“When I started out in politics, we talked all the time about campaign finance reform, and in the last ten years that’s been largely absent from the Democratic messaging,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) this summer. He continued:

If we’re talking again every single day about how if you give us power, we will get big money out of politics and we will get that corporate influence out of politics, then we have a chance, a chance, at [getting] folks who have been out of the game, who have been sitting on the sidelines, to re-enter. But that has to be paired with an agenda that has solutions that are as big as the problems people are facing.

Murphy and Ossoff are not the only high-profile Democrats warming to the opportunity. In the House, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has been leading the battle to overturn Citizens United, call Trump’s bluff on his own long-forgotten ethics pledges, and press prosecutors to bring more bribery cases. In the Senate, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) uses his platform to expose conservatives’ master plan to capture the courts and elicit rulings normalizing so much corruption. And both Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are holding rallies across the country to indict oligarchs’ outsize political influence.

For this nascent movement, however, questions remain: Have so many anti-corruption pledges been broken in the past that Americans will never believe them here in the present?

And have voters become so inured to corruption that they no longer think it can be stopped?

It’s possible. But a year out from the midterm elections, Reuters’s new poll shows Trump now holds a 2016-esque lead over the opposition party when voters are asked who they trust to combat corruption.

So an equally harrowing question now lingers: If Democrats don’t try to make anti-corruption their focus and deliver real reforms, what will happen to their party — and to what’s left of American democracy?