I found 2 more polls that do agree that corruption was a big issue.
AI was also an issue, where 40 out of 41 districts “rejected AI” when voting on it directly. Trump has been a strong supporter, but clearly a degree of regulation will likely be needed. Doing this seems a very difficult task. However, it is important that many states merely want companies to pay more for electricity, so the degree varies considerably.
Evidence? It’s hard to get! Stats based on exit polls (like the NBC stats linked above) fail to account that many votes bypass election-day voting and early and mail-in votes vary by demographic group. The NBC stats would have been MUCH more useful if they’d facilitated an apples-vs-apples comparison by showing the same stats from 2022. Self-reporting has other problems. Voters who identify themselves as “MAGA” supposedly voted overwhelmingly for the R’s … but would they admit that they once were MAGA if they’d woken up?
And the best stats (e.g. Pew) are not available yet.
I am left with one observation – obvious perhaps, but worth repeating. By far the winner in almost every U.S. election is “Did_Not_Vote”. People who normally vote D voted D in 2026. People who normally vote R voted overwhelmingly R in 2026 if they voted at all. The results are dominated by who DIDN’T vote.
Turnout is a huge factor. Ds were energized. Rs were disillusioned and didn’t even vote. This trend is visible in the NBC stats linked to above.
As pointed abovethread, the war was a huge part of it.
And if @PhillyGuy had bothered to read the cite I gave, he’d have found this:
A Fox News poll published last week found 60% of registered voters are extremely concerned about government corruption, surpassing concerns about inflation and high prices. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found some two-thirds of respondents think Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, up 10 percentage points since September 2025. Gallup recently found perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. have hit multi-decade highs. And an August poll from Reuters/Ipsos found nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump’s businesses influence his presidential decisions.
Teapot Dome indeed. The Secretary of the Interior took $239,000 in bribes (equivalent to $10.72 million in 2025). TFG and his family’s corruption makes this look like pocket change, quite literally. TFG is alleged to have made $600-700 million on T****coin, been gifted a $400 million dollar jet as a bribe by Qatar, the Albanian government is unstable and teetering on revolution because of the TFG family’s dodgy attempt to steal an Albanian Island for a $4 billion resort… I could go on for pages.
What’s surprising to me is that this apparently mattered to voters, he didn’t make blatant, open corruption so banal that it was just accepted as the new normal, which I had honestly feared it had become. More surprising to me was that it seems to have been an even bigger issue for some than the price of gas or food.
Thanks for folks bringing the cites–I’m reading through them, slowly. And thanks to @Aspenglow for moderating it so well!
I don’t have a direct cite here, but I would like to point out one thing.
“Corruption” as the big issue in the election could well have been the case, but it is one that could cut both ways.
My home representative put fighting government corruption as his principal campaign issue (in his own ads - the superPACs supporting him tried to paint his challenger as wanting to make all your kids transgender). But his example of fighting corruption was sponsoring a bill to make it harder for congresscritters to benefit from their inside knowledge via the stock market (which, mind you, is a very good thing). He didn’t do or mention a thing about Trump administration corruption, and it’s a pretty good guess that many if not most of his voters didn’t consider anything coming from the administration to actually be corrupt.
Which is not to say that corruption is a bad issue - it is in fact a very important one - but a simple answer of “corruption” to an exit poll about voter motivations might point to diverse sources of that corruption, and its possible that two voters answering “corruption” on that exit poll might have voted for different parties.
Yeah, this is a problem I’m seeing in a lot of the data around this election: there’s correlation, but not causation.
People list corruption as a major issue. “Drain the swamp” was a major MAGA theme, though, and MAGA folks might prioritize fighting corruption while voting for the GOP.
Young people voted in greater numbers, according to the cites above, and tended to vote much more blue. That’s good evidence of causation. Do we know why young people tended to vote much more blue? Again, not asking for hypotheses, I have a half-dozen of those; I’m curious if we have data to support a hypothesis.
Speaking of posts that could use a cite.
You wouldn’t have been able to find one, because you are wrong. According to the Census Bureau, 65.3% of Americans over 18 voted in the 2024 election, and Presidential elections usually have participation easily over 60%; the lowest from 1980 to now was in 1996, when only 58.4% of voting-age Americans voted.
Participation in midterms is a bit lower, but not as bad as you’d think: 52.2% and 53.4% showed up for the 2022 and 2018 midterms, respectively. And it’s a safe bet that participation this year will have been above 50% as well.
It is true that in most of the post-1980 midterms, less than 50% of voting-age Americans have voted, but it’s only once been below 45% in that period.
He’s guilty of hyperbole, but the idea that fewer than 95% of Americans didn’t think voting this time was essential seems like a major indictment of, well, everything about the USA.
For two reasons- the stupidity of the war, yes, but mainly the rise in fuel costs from the war.
I do not trust Fox news. MAGAs are also making noise about “corruption”. That does not mean it was not a significant issue.
Correct.
Please do note that the GOP has done everything it can to disenfranchise and stop certain people from voting.
Only it’s not a vague concept of “corruption” at issue, it’s directly TFG’s corruption since his reelection.
WASHINGTON - A majority of Americans believe President Donald Trump and his family have inappropriately profited from cryptocurrency since his return to power and that his policy decisions are influenced by his private business dealings, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
The four-day poll, completed Aug. 17, found that half of Trump’s own Republicans believe the president allows considerations for his business interests to influence his decisions, a striking finding for a leader who pledged to clean up corruption in Washington.
Trump was born into a New York real estate family and built his name into a globally recognized brand before running for office. He earned more than $1.4 billion last year from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures, including World Liberty Financial and the Trump meme coin, digital assets he has publicly championed.
Some 63% of respondents said it was inappropriate for Trump and his family to have profited in that way, while 32% said it was appropriate and the rest did not answer the question. About 3 in 10 Republican respondents called the deals inappropriate, while 7 in 10 said they were appropriate.
Things are bad when almost 1/3 of Republicans view him as corrupt. Yes, you could spin that as the response to the question technically being “inappropriate for him to have profited”, but that’s literally just the definition of “corruption”.
My post pointed at the AP poll and even the right wing’s “The Spectator”, as they said to their readers:
“It was indeed the corruption, stupid”
Oh I agree that corruption was a major issue. But the economy was #1. That agrees with you first cite, and your second cite simply says Corruption was
The exit polls in the midterm elections revealed that corruption in government was almost as much an issue as the cost of living for voters.
A stunning 90 percent of voters said it was a crucial or major factor in their vote.
So, it is still the Economy as #1.
It does not “simply” say that:
A stunning 90 percent of voters said it was a crucial or major factor in their vote. Neither party was trusted to combat it – 36 percent said Democrats, while 31 percent said Republicans. But the GOP was the main target of voter anger. A majority of voters viewed corruption as a crucial issue in the campaign, they voted for Democrats by 62 percent to 36 percent. Republicans were the party in power and were saddled with a president who surrounded himself with shady characters and seemed to almost revel in padding his income by $2 billion last year.
“Corruption is a bipartisan issue, nothing ever hits 90 percent in any survey unless it resonates deeply with people,” says Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst. “The fact that corruption has been linked with the struggles people are having with affordavility is devastating for Republicans."
(Bolding mine)
The corruption of the administration and the support it was given to by the Republicans was, for a lot of people, a big part of why they think the economy is what it is now.
Sheer turnout was another reason.
I don’t see an obvious share button so this may be behind the paywall. Historic voter turnout powered Democrats’ blue wave
National turnout was 49%, the second highest in the past 100 years after 2018, reported the University of Florida Election Lab. The three states with the highest turnout, all over 63%, were Michigan, Maine, and Minnesota, each of which went blue. States with competitive Senate races averaged 52% turnout.
And this.
Lower-propensity voters showed up because they were “upset over the economy, perhaps a little anger over the Iran war and it’s relationship to higher gas prices.”
There’s a chart a ways down in this article, that shows the national popular vote for the last three Congressional elections.
Election deniers are back—and dumber than ever - Daily Kos Election deniers are back—and dumber than ever - Daily Kos
We all know that turnout is usually lower in midterm elections. That held for the Republicans, but the Democrats had just about the same turnout as in 2024. So, fundamentally, “It was Trump”, because something motivated Democrats to vote more than usual, but not Republicans.
Good lord these are some dumb, dumb, dumb people. I followed some of those links to posts on X and they would be hilarious if they weren’t so disconnected from reality.
I did enjoy the people in the comments talking about how SI (super intelligence) would help root out all the “illegals”’ who were allowed to vote. They are so far down the MAGA rabbit hole they won’t use “AI” since DJT doesn’t like it.
Uh… Supposing a 50-50 D-R split for simplicity, if Ds were 10% more likely than usual to vote, and Rs were 10% less likely to vote than usual then
the Ds would have outperformed
and the reason is synopsized by the word
Turn-out
And if I misconstrued your point, the other point is also wrong: the 65.3% were split roughly 32.5, 31.6, 1.2 among (R, D, I) which leaves 34.7 (100 - 65.3) – the Did_Not_Vote’ers – besting both Trump and Harris.