Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high food and gasoline prices, according to CNBC All-America’s final economic survey ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The finding follows a months-long communications effort by Democrats to link widespread economic discontent to what they claim is rampant corruption by President Donald Trump and his Republican allies.
CNBC’s survey of 1,000 registered U.S. voters found that 36% of respondents named government corruption as one of the most important problems facing the country today. The cost of food and groceries comes in second at 34%, followed by protecting democracy and the price of gasoline, which each garner 23%.
The national poll, which gauged attitudes about the economy, Trump, Congress, artificial intelligence, the Iran war and more, was conducted Oct. 14-18. It was co-conducted by Democratic pollster Hart Research Associates and Republican pollster Public Opinion Strategies, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Read the full survey results here.
To be sure, the question asking voters to name their top concerns lists several economic and cost-related topics separately, thereby subdividing an issue that might otherwise be ranked higher if lumped into a single category.
But the results nevertheless dovetail with other recent polls showing that corruption has become one of voters’ pressing concerns.
A Fox News poll released last week found that 60 percent 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 that about two-thirds of respondents believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, an increase of 10 percentage points since September 2025. Gallup recently found that perceptions of government corruption in the United States have reached multi-decade highs. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll in August found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump’s businesses influence his presidential decisions.
Republicans have also tried to take advantage of growing anti-corruption sentiment. The Trump administration launched a task force led by Vice President JD Vance to combat fraud, while the president frequently accuses his Democratic foes of fraud.
“I just want to say that since my first day in office, we have waged an unprecedented war on corruption and fraud, and we will not let our country be pillaged and plundered by foreign thieves and hackers and fraudsters and basically scum,” Trump said Tuesday as he unveiled a new reward program for whistleblowers.
But with Republicans running the federal government — and as the high costs of Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran have put the Republican Party on defense — Democrats have been able to lay blame more directly.
“Americans spent well over $100 BILLION more on gas because Trump chose to go to war with Iran,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, said Wednesday on X. “His ego-driven decisions are costing you thousands of dollars.”
Floodlights illuminate light rain clouds around the United States Capitol on the night of October 11, 2026 in Washington, DC.
J.David Ake | Getty Images
Their arguments often spotlight Trump, attempting to contrast the financial hardship widely felt by Americans in the face of the president’s growing net worth, his family’s lucrative business dealings and his focus on expensive construction projects.
Other Democratic candidates have broadened the scope of the message, saying the system itself is broken.
“The problem is that the people’s elected representatives don’t represent the people. They represent the donors and the special interests,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said in an April campaign video. “Corruption is the reason things don’t work for ordinary people.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., hammered home the claim that Republicans have betrayed their commitment to cutting costs.
“The rich and well-connected benefit. What are Republicans doing to lower costs for everyone? Absolutely nothing,” Jeffries wrote Friday.
Rhetoric and results
The Democrats’ desire appears to resonate with voters, even if a large portion remains skeptical of both parties.
Respondents to the CNBC survey gave Democrats a 4-point advantage over Republicans, 35% to 31%, when asked which party would do the best job fighting government corruption.
But that gap widened to 17 points in favor of Democrats among voters who said corruption was their most important issue.
And independents, by a 15-point margin, said Democrats would tackle corruption better than Republicans — even though 41 percent of those surveyed think neither party would do a good job.
The apparent rise in concerns about corruption is good news for the president’s critics who have long lamented that Americans have become desensitized to scandal in the Trump era.
This shift is happening because voters are feeling the impact of inflation and relating it to what they see in Washington, Brian Lemek, director of the Democratic-backed political action committee Defend the Vote, said in an interview.
“It’s the only thing people are talking about right now,” said Lemek, whose group briefed candidates on the issue in June.
Voters are “waking up to the fact that their costs are high” and “making the connection between this corrupt and failing system and their high costs,” he said.
Additionally, respondents overwhelmingly opposed the idea that elected officials, including the president and members of Congress, personally own or trade stock in individual companies that have contracts with the federal government. This should not be allowed, 93% of voters said in the poll.
A similar proportion – 89% – said companies owned or invested in by members of a sitting president’s immediate family should not be allowed to receive contracts from the federal government.
“It definitely ties into the corruption issues that we’ve been talking about,” said Alicia Simmons of Hart Research Associates.
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