In the run-up to the Grand Old Party’s (GOP) historic midterm humbling, pollsters warned that corruption in government had surged to the top of voters’ concerns, second only to the rising cost of living.
Oblivious to such warnings, US President Donald Trump spent the day before the pivotal elections showing off his costly renovations in the nation’s capital, including his troubled Reflecting Pool and the $400 million White House ballroom he plans to build after razing the historic East Wing to the ground.
It followed weeks of bizarre, rambling campaign speeches that saw the president boast about the “freaking fortune” the oil industry was making from the Iran war and joke that the $5,000 checks he dangled at voters wouldn’t even buy them a hamburger at his Florida resort.
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By all accounts, it was a baffling effort from a president who once cast himself as an outsider challenging the Washington establishment – but whose personal wealth has more than tripled since the start of his second term in office.
The messaging has been “remarkably tone-deaf for somebody who is normally a pretty shrewd populist operator”, said Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee.
“Trump continuously goes off on these weird tangents about things that aren’t important to people, or he brags about how much gas costs right now and how much money companies are making,” Heye added. “Many voters see him as focused on what’s important to him, not what’s important to them.”
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An angry electorate
Throughout the election campaign, Trump repeatedly urged voters to pretend he was on the ballot. Many did just that, punishing his GOP and propelling Democrats to stunning victories across the map, including in states that had voted Republican for decades and that Trump won by double digits just two years ago.
Voters nationwide were in the mood for change, according to an AP survey of some 80,000 voters across all 50 states, which found that roughly three-quarters of voters were “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the direction of the country.
Among those who had Trump in mind when they cast their vote, about twice as many wanted to express opposition to the Republican president as those who wanted to support him. Most blamed the Trump administration for high costs and roughly 6 in 10 said the president placed a higher priority on his personal interests than the country’s.
More than half of voters nationally said government corruption was “crucial” to their vote for Congress, even topping the number that said that about the cost of living – and well above the share for other topics including immigration enforcement, the war in Iran and AI data centres.
‘Scandalous candidates’
In a late-night phone interview with Fox News on Election Day, Trump said he didn’t consider the elections to be a personal defeat. Voters, he argued, simply “didn’t like the candidates”.
That was especially true of candidates hand-picked by the president himself, most notably his scandal-plagued Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton, whom he endorsed in a primary contest against incumbent Senator John Cornyn – ignoring the concerns of Republican officials in the Lone Star State.
Paxton had previously been impeached by his own party over corruption accusations and was stained in the eyes of many voters by a very public divorce. On Tuesday, he became the first Texas Republican to lose a Senate race since 1988.
“Trump chose weak and scandalous candidates, betting on the wrong horses,” said Steven Ekovich, a professor emeritus of political science at the American University in Paris.
The president’s historically low approval ratings further weakened Republican candidates, already saddled with economic problems of Trump’s making, Ekovich added, referring to the effects of the president’s trade wars and the turmoil in the Middle East, triggered by the US and Israeli attack on Iran.
“Economic problems are central in any election, and in this case they were clearly his problems: he made them, cannot distance himself from them, and the American people saw it clearly and sanctioned him,” Ekovich said.
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James Talarico’s stunning win in the Senate race in Texas, where Democrats also clinched the governor’s seat for the first time in more than 30 years, offered vindication of the party’s strategy to choose pocketbook issues over ideology.
In Texas and across the nation, Democrats focused their campaigns on corruption and affordability, blaming Trump’s tariff policies and the Iran war for driving up costs while highlighting the billions of dollars the Trump family has made since he returned to the White House.
In contrast, many Republicans – led by the president – attacked Democrats over culture war issues such as transgender rights while attempting to cast their opponents as radical and extreme.
Voters made it clear they were far more concerned with corruption and the economy.
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In rural Iowa – where Democrats also clinched famous wins in the Senate and governor’s races – AP found that roughly half of voters said government corruption was “crucial” to their vote, while about 4 in 10 said this about the cost of living – well above other issues.
The numbers were similar in the key battleground state of Michigan, where voters elected the country’s first Muslim senator, with only 2 in 10 saying Abdul El-Sayed’s stance on Israel – which had dominated media coverage – weighed heavily on their choice. El-Sayed is a vocal critic of both US military aid to Israel and its human right record.
Going after the ‘Trump crime family’
Emboldened by historic victories in Republican bastions, Democrats are now promising swift action on living costs and the war in Iran, while signalling that investigations of alleged abuses and corruption will be a major priority.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become the first Black speaker when the new Congress takes office in January, vowed to go after what he described as “unprecedented corruption” in the government.
“Because if you have people in high office who are so focused on enriching themselves, their family members, their friends, or their donors, then they’re not focused on making life better for the American people,” he said.
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Robert Garcia, the Democrat expected to chair the powerful House Oversight Committee, fired off a blunt election-night message to Republicans on social media: “LAWYER UP”.
Garcia, who is a fierce critic of what he terms the “Trump crime family”, published an online “grift tracker” detailing how the president and his close relatives have profited during his second term. He recently told the Washington Post, “there’s so much corruption and grift that it’s going to take the entire House on the Democratic side to do investigations appropriately”.
With control of committees in both chambers, Democrats can summon officials, demand documents and hold public hearings, putting Trump and his senior aides under intense scrutiny.
Read moreFamily wealth, Epstein, ‘vanity projects’: How Democrats plan to investigate Trump after midterms
Investigating the Trump family’s business and cryptocurrency dealings, including lucrative defence contracts tied to Eric and Donald Trump Jr, will be a top priority for the incoming Democratic majorities. An investigation into the Middle Eastern and Albanian financial interests of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is already under way. They are also expected to probe government contracts involving billionaire Elon Musk, who donated close to half a billion dollars to Republican candidates in the midterm elections.
The president’s Washington “vanity projects” are equally bound to draw scrutiny. Representative Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee that oversees all federal lands, has vowed to investigate whether donors to the ballroom project received favourable treatment from the administration.
‘Thoughtful and strategic’
Even as they investigate those in Trump’s circle, Democrats will be keen to show they are addressing the immediate concerns of US voters.
“More than 90 percent of voters think that government has been corrupted. We just have to be thoughtful and strategic about where investigative work goes and not allow that to distract us from solving fairly immediate cost problems that American families feel,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a likely chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Hill on the eve of the vote.
The administration is widely expected to resist demands for testimony or documents, setting the stage for protracted court battles. How the contest plays out could shape Washington politics over the coming years.
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Investigating allegations of corruption in the president’s entourage will put Democrats “on the right side” of an issue that resonates with voters, said Timothy Snyder, a historian at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
“People who are [Trump’s] friends and his family are making billions of dollars, in essentially selling out national interests,” he said. “If you don’t call those things by their plain name, it’s very hard to do anything about them.”
Failure to address corruption in government could prove costly for both parties, with AP’s survey suggesting the Democratic Party is not much more popular with voters than Republicans despite the “Blue Tsunami” sweeping the country.
“The reality is voters are not happy. They’re not happy with Republicans, certainly. They’re also not particularly happy with Democrats,” said Heye, the former Republican strategist. “Washington is very unpopular. And until Washington tries to tackle some of these problems, it will remain that way.”
This story originally appeared on France24
