Concern about government corruption has overtaken the economy as the leading worry among American voters heading into the midterm elections, according to a series of new national polls — a shift that Miles Taylor, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first administration, argues amounts to a “death sentence” for MAGA as a governing movement.

Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration and became widely known for leaking internal White House secrets, laid out his assessment on Friday in a published commentary.

Corruption Ranks First for Voters

Citing a Fox News poll released this week, Taylor wrote: “A Fox News poll released this week asked registered voters what worries them most heading into the midterms. The winner was not affordability or the economy, which have dominated every election cycle in living memory. It was corruption in government. A whopping 88 percent of voters said they were extremely or very concerned about it. It beat high gas and grocery prices. It beat healthcare. It beat everything!”

In the same survey, Trump’s approval rating sank to 36 percent, the lowest Fox News has ever recorded for him. In other polls, it has dipped into the 20s.

Taylor noted that a day earlier, an AP-NORC survey — a joint project of The Associated Press and the nonpartisan research organization NORC at the University of Chicago — found that most Americans believe Trump is profiting from the presidency either illegally or unethically, and that he is more focused on building his own wealth than on helping everyday people.

A Gallup poll separately reported that 89 percent of Americans now believe corruption is widespread in their government — the highest level Gallup has ever measured in its decades of tracking the question, and a reading that places the United States at the very bottom of the developed world, out of 38 countries, when it comes to perceived corruption.

“These are history-making developments,” Taylor wrote. The timing sharpens the stakes: every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and roughly one-third of the Senate will be on the ballot in the midterms, three weeks away.

An Unprecedented Shift

Pollsters have been asking Americans what worries them most for nearly 100 years, Taylor observed, and although corruption scandals have repeatedly surfaced, the issue has never outranked economic concerns — not even after Watergate, when voters still ranked the economy and inflation ahead of Nixon’s crimes.

In his view, that has changed because “Trump has made corruption literally impossible to ignore. He turned it from a background story that’s always playing out in Washington into basically the lead story of every news cycle for the past 18 months. What’s worse, the high prices people are experiencing at the grocery and at the pump are in no small part because of Trump’s corruption.”

Taylor asserted that the president’s corruption will have dire repercussions for the country, but argued the consequences are outright existential for Trump’s political movement.

“These latest polling numbers are a death sentence for MAGA as a governing movement,” he wrote. “To a certain extent, affordability is an issue a president can blame on someone else, and this one certainly tries. He points at the Fed, at Biden, at foreigners, etc. But corruption is personal. It’s a profound statement on the character of the man in charge and of our leaders writ large. And this week, it became abundantly clear that voters have rendered their judgment.”

No Message Can Fix It

In Taylor’s estimation, there is nothing Trump can do to alter the dynamic in the three short weeks before the midterms.

“When nine-in-ten Americans say the government is corrupt and only one-in-ten say the president is looking out for them, the little guy, there’s no earthly messaging strategy that can save the party in power,” he concluded. “The Republicans running with Trump’s name on their ballots are running on the most radioactive issue in modern American political history because they have slavishly covered for his corruption or outright enabled it. Trump spent more than a decade telling Americans the system was rigged. He finally convinced them. What he didn’t tell them is that he would be the one rigging it. Now they’ve noticed.”

The midterms, falling three weeks after the commentary was published, will show whether the polling pattern holds at the ballot box.