New Hampshire Congressman Chris Pappas, now a Senate candidate, has built his campaign around his anti-corruption work in Congress. He points to his record of not taking "a dime of corporate PAC money," his opposition to congressional stock trading, and his push to ban companies from using AI to set prices based on Americans' personal data as proof of his commitment to ethics reform.

A super PAC aligned with his prospective Republican opponent, John Sununu, has fired back with ads branding Pappas corrupt, alleging that Pappas "serves on a House committee that oversees Uber, where his husband, a former lobbyist, serves in an executive policy role."

Their race is one of many in which corruption has taken center stage in the 2026 midterms — the November 3 elections in which all 435 House seats, roughly a third of the Senate, and 36 governorships are on the ballot. On her DCinbox Substack, which tracks "how members of Congress communicate with constituents," 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 in their constituent emails this year. The pattern suggests corruption talk is now an intentional part of Democratic Party strategy.

Why?

One explanation could be that there simply is a lot of corruption happening. Yet a puzzling feature of these ads is how rarely they mention President Donald Trump, despite plentiful allegations of corrupt acts by Trump and members of his administration — allegations documented by watchdog groups.

Another possibility is that the public is unusually worried about corruption. Research indicates, however, that the public is always somewhat concerned about corruption, and that those worries often do not correspond with particular actions by politicians.

So what is really going on?

The talk, it turns out, is not primarily about specific, identifiable corruption. It is about delegitimizing your opponent.

The Choice of Those Out of Power

A recent book, "American Corruption Talk", co-authored by Molly Brigid McGrath, analyzes how prevalent what the authors call "corruption talk" has been among presidents and presidential candidates since the nation's founding. Corruption talk, they argue, differs from talk about real corruption: many Americans identify things as corrupt even when they do not meet the textbook definition of corruption.

The book identifies three types of corruption:

• Transactional corruption is inherent in particular acts — offering or accepting a bribe, for instance.
• Moral corruption means being a rotten person — someone who is corrupt is untrustworthy even when nothing specific they have done wrong can be identified.
• Systemic corruption concerns the government's behavior itself — not bad people, but bad institutions.

Corruption talk blurs the distinctions among these three.

Tracing changes over time in how presidents, presidential candidates, and party platforms discuss corruption, the authors found that parties out of power talk far more about corruption than those in power. The pattern is a familiar one for the party that does not hold the White House, which typically loses ground in midterm years — as Democrats did in 2010 and 2014 and Republicans did in 2018 and 2022. Corruption talk is popular among politicians who want to avoid strong ideological positions or close ties to 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.

Corruption is what political scientists call a valence issue — nearly everyone agrees corruption is bad, but not everyone agrees about how much of it exists. Corruption talk is useful for uniting parties or candidates who would rather avoid divisive issues. It is also a way to delegitimize the opposition: if one's opponents are corrupt, nothing they say matters. They are the kind of people who would do corrupt things, even if they have not done them yet.

Democrats Avoid Division

The Democrats' corruption talk of 2026 checks all of these boxes.

The party has internal divisions — from political ideology to policy on Israel — that it may prefer not to discuss.

Talking about specific things Trump has done requires too much explanation; describing the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause in a 30-second ad is difficult. That clause bars the president from accepting "'any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever' from a foreign government unless Congress consents," and Trump has been accused of violating it.

But talking about corruption in a moral or systemic sense — suggesting the country is in decline, or that elites are out of touch — can be effective.

"To every Utahn tired of chaos and corruption, there's a place for you on this campaign," Ben McAdams, a former Democratic congressman from Utah and current House candidate, declared in a July 2026 Instagram post.

Talking about corruption is thus a way to talk about Trump and his administration without naming them. Voters unhappy with Trump will hear corruption talk as an indictment of him, while Trump supporters may assume the corruption lies elsewhere — after all, Trump won the 2016 election in part by promising to take on the corrupt establishment.

These distinctions — real corruption versus corruption talk — go back at least to the country's founding, if not further. Historically, corruption talk has stood in for other things. The Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when activists in both parties worked together on reforms in government, economic policy, and social policy, was the period in which corruption talk was most prevalent in American politicians' rhetoric. It was also a moment when America was almost as polarized and economically unequal as it is today, and many Americans viewed that inequality as a symptom of corruption.

None of this denies that the U.S. currently has a president who has engaged in more overt acts of corruption than any other. Trump's actions — from his family's 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 histories of lobbying the very agencies they now run), to his alleged ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein — have no doubt catalyzed this discussion.

The test of the strategy will come on Election Day, when it becomes clear whether corruption talk can again do for out-of-power politicians what it has done throughout American history — and whether the candidates who deployed it most, like Pappas in New Hampshire, prevail. Yet it is perhaps fitting that the nation's 250th anniversary has been marked by a return to a classic American preoccupation: the traditional American pastime of corruption talk.

Robert Boatright, Professor of Political Science, Clark University; Institute for Humane Studies

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.