Donald Trump hadn’t even been inaugurated yet when Jessica Tucker started fixating on an idea that would help Democrats win control of Congress nearly two years later.
On New Year’s Day in 2025, the research director for Senate Majority PAC was reading a book about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that described how he didn’t honor some contracts, believing his wealth would shield him from legal consequences.
It made Tucker wonder how many Republican politicians also thought the rules didn’t apply to them — and whether Democrats could exploit that in the next election. She soon realized she was on to something.
“In all of these cases,” Tucker told The Washington Sun, “they did behave that way, and we found it, and we used it.”
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Used it they did. SMP, which is aligned with Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, spent $290 million on anticorruption ads this year, according to an official with the group, the culmination of a nearly two-year project from the super PAC that would reach almost every competitive Senate race. In some key races, like those in Ohio, Iowa and Kansas, the group’s voter research found the anticorruption push ranked among the party’s most effective messages.
The super PAC tied Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio to a bribery scandal involving the utility company FirstEnergy. It attacked Senate nominee Ashley Hinson over corruption in Iowa, citing how wealthy she had become since joining Congress. And it linked Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas to associates of the infamous convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Senior officials at SMP credit the focus on corruption as helping Democrats smash expectations and win as many as nine seats in the midterms.
“We’ve all been waiting 20 years to be able to run corruption against the Republicans. And it was never valid before, because voters simply believe that all politicians are corrupt, and it was tough to get traction in it,” said J.B. Poersch, SMP’s president. “But it was different in this cycle.”
The difference, he said, was that an issue the public once saw as a question of ethics had become a question of money, aligned with voters’ top overall concern about everyday affordability.
Voters “came to the belief that corruption was costing them money,” Poersch said. “Literally, they believed that one of the reasons why costs weren’t coming down and things weren’t getting solved was that politicians were too busy feathering their nests.”
SMP was one of a handful of super PACs and committees to place a heavy emphasis on corruption this year, with both Democrats and Republicans citing the issue repeatedly in their ads.
But the Democratic super PAC’s cycle-long research effort and its effect with voters — the results of which it shared widely within the larger party ecosystem — underscores just how large a role corruption played in the midterms.
It also challenges the prevailing explanation from some Republican leaders, including Vice President JD Vance, that the Iran War is almost entirely responsible for the party’s electoral wipeout. SMP’s ads didn’t explicitly mention Trump, but strategists involved in the effort say they believe his conduct in office helped elevate the issue with voters, some of whom came to believe his Republican allies in Congress were acting the same way.
“They didn’t say, ‘Oh, Trump did this, therefore, I’m gonna punish Republican X,’” said Jef Pollock, a veteran Democratic strategist who worked on SMP’s campaign. “What Trump did is raise the specter of corruption with the glittering gold of the ballrooms, and the monuments … and caused the voters to say, ‘Hold on, what does this mean to me?’”
Pollock and his firm, Global Strategy Group, worked with SMP on the corruption project, along with Jesse Stinebring, the co-founder of the Democratic data and analytics group Blue Rose Research.
Pollock said he was unsure how wise a focus on corruption would be when SMP officials began discussing it in 2025. The issue hasn’t been a broad theme of an election since the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal in 2006, and Democrats already had promising lines of attack focused more directly on cost-of-living concerns.
“To me, it was not obvious,” he said. “And a danger, a real danger, was that somebody’s gonna be like, ‘Well, what the hell are you guys doing? You’re talking about stuff that’s not about the economy.’”
SMP’s research would soon erase any doubts. Officials involved in the effort said that voters in focus groups shared their concerns about corruption without being prompted, often mentioning their particular frustration with the way many officeholders saw their personal wealth soar.
“They were just volunteering that corruption was a big thing,” Poersch said.
Polling from SMP in the summer of 2025 found that voters perceived that an economy rigged by the rich and powerful was a core problem for the country, and they responded best to candidates who vowed to take on corruption in both parties. By October of that year, Tucker and Poersch had decided that corruption would be the unifying theme of their messaging campaigns in 2026, according to an SMP official, tying together concerns over rising costs across a range of sectors, including spiking utility bills and drug prices.
SMP’s research also showed the group how their message could fail. Even as many Democrats became enraged at Trump’s construction of a White House ballroom or acceptance of a new presidential plane from the Qatari government, the data showed those developments did little to sway public opinion.
What voters did respond to were specific actions taken by Republican candidates that Democrats could use to accuse them of benefiting the elite at the expense of average people.
Focus groups in May of this year, for instance, found that voters did not see Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska as any more corrupt than other politicians. What did work, per the research, was a reference to campaign contributions Sullivan received from out-of-state fishing companies, which SMP would later allege in ads was proof that the incumbent lawmaker wasn’t doing enough to support in-state fishing operations.
That basic approach — single out an alleged act of corruption, show who benefited and show how it was hurting everyday people — would be repeated across the map.
“It’s that three-part formula that we really deployed in every race,” Stinebring said. “And it ultimately took corruption as this amorphous thing, that, yes, Trump was a part of, that, yes, people feel about the system, and made it unique, and abhorrent, and costly to you, the voter, in every single race.”
SMP shared its corruption research with nearly 300 other Democratic strategists by Election Day, encouraging other groups to adopt a similar framing in their campaign ads.
Tucker had led the research into each Republican candidate, eventually compiling dossiers on nearly every Senate opponent. In some states, like Ohio or Michigan, she discovered new facts about old controversies pertaining to Husted or Mike Rogers.
The public’s attitude about corruption had shifted, she said, and groups like SMP had to shift with it.
“It was a matter of just once you start seeing it,” Tucker said, “you can see it everywhere.”
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