Corruption Is the Top Issue for Voters

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A recent Fox News poll found the top issue concerning voters. No, not transgender athletes or sharia law. Corruption.   

CNBC, too, found corruption to be the top issue, followed by affordability and protecting democracy. All this echoes a Brennan Center poll from earlier this year that first found the seething public anger.  

In 2026, voters are acting. In ballot initiatives across the country, they are rewriting rules of politics, addressing money in politics, voting, gerrymandering, and more. This kind of direct democracy, first established a century ago, gives citizens a say in writing the rules. It’s one more reason for hope this year.  

We see flashing signs of a political system in need of repair.  

This morning, we published new research on the jarring new role for big money in American elections. The top 40 donors in this year’s election gave eight times more by this point in the cycle than the top 40 in 2014. The funds increasingly tilt toward Republicans, who get three times as much support from this group as Democrats. 

Consider this startling fact: Labor unions, once major donors, have dropped out of the picture. They do not make the top 40 this year. Labor has been replaced by crypto moguls in the ranks of top donors. That says a lot about the shifting shape of our economy.  

Voters get all this. They connect a broken politics to their own economic distress. Even as the economy chugs along, with the stock market aloft, voters know a different reality. Here’s an astounding statistic from last year: The top 10 percent of households are responsible for half of all consumer spending in this country. Most Americans, in other words, are in a recession — combined with inflation, “stagflation” we have not seen since the 1970s. No wonder they’re mad.

South Dakota was the first state to give voters the chance to pass laws back in 1898. Throughout the Progressive Era, especially in the West, state constitutions empowered citizens to write laws. Direct democracy can be a mess. But at its best it has allowed citizens to bypass the self-interest of politicians. Redistricting and campaign reforms often have been enacted this way. 

Next Tuesday, according to Democracy Docket, citizens in 20 states will consider 25 measures that would address the rules of democracy, many of them put on the ballot by citizens’ initiatives. 

“In Michigan, voters will decide whether to limit political contributions by state contractors and utility companies and crack down on dark money,” my colleague Penny Mack writes in State Court Report. 

In Montana, voters will decide whether to bar corporations chartered there from making political expenditures. Backers call it a way to challenge Citizens United. In California, voters may repeal a longtime ban on public financing of campaigns.  

In Alaska, 72 percent of voters in August approved Ballot Measure 1, which imposes tight limits on campaign contributions to candidates. Now voters will be asked to repeal campaign disclosure laws. “Voters approved the disclosure law in 2020 as part of a package that also instituted ranked-choice voting in the state,” Mack writes. “Six years later, the two provisions are the subject of a combined effort to repeal both.”   

Campaign finance is not the only topic before state voters. In some states, ballot measures would restrict voting. Notably, California voters are being asked to approve voter ID for in-person or mail voting. And in Missouri, voters have a chance to block the mid-decade redistricting plan demanded by Donald Trump — and to protect the referendum process itself.  

And in six states, voters will choose whether to impose a requirement to prove citizenship with documents such as a birth certificate or passport to register or vote.  

A week from now, as votes are being counted, politicians and lawmakers will quickly ask what it all meant. Every indication is that the voters are demanding action this year.  

Sometimes voters help shape a political era through ballot measures. In the early 20th century, direct democracy in many states extended the vote to women and backed giving voters, not state legislatures, the power to elect U.S. senators. Proposition 13 in 1978 cut taxes in California, crippling the state’s finances but also setting the stage for the Reagan Revolution two years later. Ballot measures ending affirmative action were early auguries of the “war on woke.”  

At the federal level, there is no provision for direct democracy. (When I was a policy aide to President Bill Clinton, I tried to persuade him to call for a federal referendum procedure, but staff members who had lived in California and experienced that state’s often messy and chaotic system prevailed.) The cries of the public can be muffled. But some years, voter anger can be  hard to ignore. 

Questions of whether this will be a wave election seem somewhat beside the point. Already, due to retirements and primary defeats in safe districts, we know there will be 83 new House members, even before any seats change party hands. There already is a wave election in both parties, an anti-incumbent surge that should rattle certainties.  

If Democrats win the House and maybe the Senate, as seems increasingly likely, they will begin to formulate agendas. The presidential race will start immediately as well. Forty-nine House candidates yesterday released a letter declaring that “our political system is broken,” and insisting that democracy reform be the first order of business. Democrats say corruption will be a key topic, but they have not put forward a plan for action.  

Recently, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan pungently pointed at the high court and its rulings. “The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.” Congress can act, with reforms ranging from an end to undisclosed dark money to a real ban on campaign contributions from government contractors to term limits for Supreme Court justices. All that will respond to the call for change from the electorate.  

Voters will speak. But will politicians act?