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A Democrat-aligned group is pushing party leadership to link affordability and corruption through a “Cost of Corruption” messaging plan.
“You have to marry the overwhelming and excessive costs that Americans are facing — you have to marry that with corruption in government,” Defend the Vote executive director Brian Lemek said.
This week, the group briefed the party’s campaign arm and purple-district candidates on a poll of 1,000 voters in battleground districts from mid-May and focus groups from April on the issue.
Although the polling found voters viewed both parties unfavorably, and about a quarter of voters said they trusted neither party to tackle corruption, respondents still ranked the cost of living and corruption in Washington as their top two issues. That has some Democrats hoping they can fill the trust vacuum and ride it to midterm gains.
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One of those purple-district candidates, Democrat Rebecca Cooke of Wisconsin, told Semafor she has adopted a similar message in her campaign. She argued that President Donald Trump and Republicans like incumbent Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., have, instead of the cost of living, been focused on projects like the White House ballroom and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which she said amounted to “more of a waste of taxpayer dollars than actually addressing [Americans’] needs.”
There is a “deep distrust of government on both sides” in her district, she said, meaning that Democrats need to meet voters where they are. The issues of corruption and cost of living “go very much hand in hand,” she added.
Notable
- Rahm Emanuel has been encouraging Democrats to focus on corruption, Semafor previously reported.