The Nudge

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Apart from James Talarico, who gets to face one of the sleaziest candidates in American history, no Democrat on the ballot this fall has a more compelling moral case against his opponent than Brian Poindexter.

 

He’s not all that interested in making it.

 

Poindexter is an ironworker-turned-newbie politician who’s running for a House seat in Ohio’s 7^th District. The incumbent there is Republican Max Miller, who stands accused by his ex-wife—the daughter of GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno—of domestic abuse and child abuse. The senator himself has pronounced Miller unfit for Congress, in need of psychological help, and so dangerous to those around him that “I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.”

 

Seems like a fruitful line of attack for a political opponent. And Poindexter is using it against Miller. Occasionally. Almost reluctantly.

 

“As I’ve said before, if the accusations against Max Miller are proven true, he should be in prison, not in Congress,” the Democrat said in a statement earlier this month. “But let me be perfectly clear. I got into this campaign to fight for my neighbors and for working people across this district. That continues to be my north star.” Poindexter has complained on the stump about “vote for me because [my opponent] sucks” political messaging and stressed in an interview with the New York Times that, “I never got in this race to run because Max Miller is terrible in his personal life. I got in it to run because of policies that hurt us.”

 

Modern Americans vote based on their own bottom-line interests, not based on which candidate is less morally rotten: That’s the Poindexter theory of whether to make corruption a campaign issue. If you read this newsletter regularly, or if you’ve simply been conscious at any point since 2016, you know there’s much to be said for it.

 

There’s another theory about the political salience of corruption, though, which we’ll call the Ossoff theory.

 

Lost in the oceans of media attention this week about Sen. Jon Ossoff’s jab at “Natalie” is how scathing the Georgia Democrat has been about Donald Trump’s self-enrichment in office. Ossoff refers to the president routinely as a “crook”—or “draft-dodging crook” when he’s feeling feisty—whose “crook family” is making billions from influence peddling. He’s linked his own Trump-backed Republican challenger, Mike Collins (a “scandal piñata”), to the president’s malfeasance as well, marveling at a rally on Sunday that "the Mar-a-Lago mafia really has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”

 

The Ossoff theory, as I perceive it, is that corruption is an essential element this cycle in a broader attack on Republicans for failing to prioritize the people’s welfare. It may be true, as the Poindexter theory states, that voters will overlook a politician’s corruption if they believe he’ll deliver more for them than the other guy on the ballot will. (That’s the lesson of 2024.) But it’s also true that if a corrupt politician isn’t delivering, the public will be primed to consider that his corruption is part of the reason why.

 

Ossoff made that point at Sunday’s rally as explicitly as one could. After rattling off a list of household expenses that have grown more costly since Trump returned to office, he concluded with this: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”

 

You’re struggling to make ends meet because the president is too busy monetizing his office to fix the cost of living.

 

Under the Ossoff theory, in the right circumstances, a candidate’s moral rottenness isn’t a distinct issue to be weighed alongside or against his ability to serve your bottom-line interest. It’s a factor in analyzing whether he and his party are likely to serve your interests, rather than their own, in the first place.

 

And while it’s unlikely to bring anyone out to the polls who wasn’t already inclined to vote, for a certain kind of voter I think it might be an effective “nudge.”

 

Both sides.

 

The challenge in attacking the other party for its corruption is that it’s the ultimate both-sides issue. Among Americans it’s an article of faith that Washington is a “swamp” and always has been, so good luck getting the average low-information voter to discern something qualitatively different about Trump’s self-enrichment spree.

 

Consider what Reuters found when it polled the issue last week. “Americans say corruption is prevalent across all levels of government, with four in 10 Democrats saying ⁠they are extremely ​angry about graft, compared with one in four Republicans,” the agency reported. “When poll respondents were asked which party was more ​corrupt, 41 percent pointed to the Democratic Party and 49 percent to the Republican Party.” Both sides!

 

And no wonder, as the American right has spent 10 years perfecting its “whataboutism” game to deafen itself to moral criticisms of Trump. Ask the average Republican about the president’s corruption and the reply—“b-b-but Hunter”—will be almost Pavlovian. I assume that’s why the White House launched an anti-fraud initiative with J.D. Vance at the helm: Doing so makes it easy for the right to answer the abundant evidence of Trump’s corruption with what about the Somalis?

 

Still, the unprecedented volume and audacity of the president’s many forms of bribe-taking does seem to have penetrated the public consciousness. Per Axios, “Ipsos polling from April and May, which asked respondents about their three top concerns, found that 37% of Americans selected financial or political corruption, a decade high and 10 points higher than the year prior.”

 

The same Reuters survey I mentioned found 69 percent of adults now believe that the interests of Trump’s businesses are influencing his decisions as president. That includes no less than 48 percent of Republicans. Whether the president’s corruption is worse than his predecessors’ is a matter of partisan dispute; that he is, in fact, corrupt is not.

 

A YouGov poll also taken last week backs that up. Do Americans approve of Trump and his family doing business with foreign countries? No, by a margin of 21-65. Fewer than half of those who voted for him in 2024 were willing to say otherwise. How about Trump investing in the cryptocurrency industry that his administration is supposed to be regulating, a gross conflict of interest that’s turning grosser by the day? Americans disapprove of that too, this time by a 20-64 split.

 

In isolation, Democratic attacks about Trump’s corruption reek of failed Resistance 1.0 “orange man bad” logic. But the point of the Ossoff theory is that corruption isn’t isolated. Ostensibly, it helps explain why the president has failed on the central issue of the midterm campaign, the cost of living. By folding it into a broader policy argument, the senator from Georgia and like-minded Democrats have turned it into more of a Resistance 2.0 attack. From a Bloomberg report published in June:

 

Voters are concerned about “both the corruption that they see with the elite and the wealthy getting ahead, and those who are close to power getting ahead or benefiting, at a time when they feel like they can’t even pay their rent and their healthcare in the same month,” said Melissa Toufanian, managing director at Navigator Research.

 

In a study released this month, the Democratic pollster found government corruption is running even with high inflation as top voter concerns in 67 battleground congressional districts. Voters in both parties have a sense that their representatives aren’t focused on the economy because they’re more concerned with their own self-interests, Toufanian said.

 

Democratic candidates are keen to leverage that moral outrage by refocusing it on scandals involving their own local Republican opponents, as Ossoff did at Sunday’s rally in Atlanta.

 

Take Roy Cooper, who’s cruising toward an easy Senate win in North Carolina by connecting the corruption of Trump’s Washington to the fact that Michael Whatley, the GOP nominee, was a “longtime lobbyist for big oil and utility companies.” Voters “want people in power who will pay attention to them, and not the billionaires and corporations that we’re seeing time and time and time again from this administration,” Cooper has said. “And I think all of the corruption that is occurring throughout Washington, D.C.—they were going to drain the swamp. It’s deeper than ever.”

 

A HuffPost analysis from earlier this summer observed that “from Georgia to Alaska, the party’s nominees are counting on being able to turn voters’ belief that widespread corruption in Washington is contributing to higher grocery, health care and energy costs down into votes against the individual Republicans they’re facing in November.” That’s the Ossoff theory in a nutshell.

 

But which voters might we expect to be moved by an argument about corruption?

 

Permission structure.

 

Not Democrats. They’ll be at the polls in force in November for a hundred other reasons. Not diehard Republicans either. They’re muttering “b-b-but Hunter” with their fingers in their ears.

 

The target for the Democratic corruption pitch is Thomas Schmidt.

 

Schmidt is a Wisconsinite whom Reuters interviewed in connection with its recent poll. He voted for the president in 2024 but has “soured” on him this year, in the agency’s words. He remains loyal enough to Trump to say, regarding the mixing of personal and public interests, “I think every president’s done something like that.” But he also finds it “concerning” and believes Trump “should be more concerned with his presidency than with his business practices."

 

A key line: “Schmidt said his biggest worries are about Trump’s inability to control inflation or extract the U.S. from the war with Iran that ​he helped start.”

 

Put it all together and you have a portrait of a center-right voter who might plausibly be convinced to stay home this fall or even to vote Democratic with the right rhetorical “nudge.” Schmidt clearly isn’t that bothered in the abstract by the president’s unethical behavior—but he sure is bothered by major policy failures involving the war and the cost of living. Like many “soft” Trump voters, he may wish to punish the GOP at the polls for letting him down yet feels reluctant to break the supreme moral commandment of right-wing tribalism, that the only unforgivable sin is helping to empower the American left.

 

He needs some sort of moral counterargument that will ease his conscience about that and let him succumb to the temptation he’s feeling to turn against Trump. That’s what the Democratic messaging about corruption is all about. It’s a “nudge” to center-right voters who were already leaning left this cycle for policy reasons to ditch their moral reservations about crossing the aisle by encouraging moral reservations about not crossing the aisle. You don’t want to enable the president in what he’s doing by continuing to vote Republican, do you?

 

Chris Stirewalt put it this way on the latest Dispatch Podcast:

 

So the Democrats who are doing a good job right now, I point to Rahm Emanuel, I point to Jon Ossoff, I point to Roy Cooper. I point to these folks who understand that the correct argument to make this cycle is about corruption and to talk about the Bitcoin and talk about the stock trades and talk about the Trump boys’ spree around the globe and the nationalization of the companies and all of this stuff which makes Republicans sick, right? … Unless you are either a total dupe or actively involved in the corruption yourself, there’s nothing that’s happening in that area that makes you say, “Yeah, good. Stick it to them.” But you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna call them out on it [if you’re a Republican] because if you do, then you’re helping the Democrats.

 

You are right, and righteous, to feel “sick.” That’s the core of Democrats’ corruption message to the right’s Thomas Schmidts. They’re offering a moral permission structure to turn against the president, to borrow a term that was briefly in vogue during Barack Obama’s administration. Donald Trump spent the last 10 years meticulously constructing a permission structure for Republican voters to condone all sorts of moral degeneracy that Christian voters formerly never would have tolerated. Democrats are now trying to build one that will make it easier for disaffected Trump supporters to come their way.

 

“This is something that can mobilize voters at the primary level and especially at the general election level, when you’re bringing in those swing voters,” Democratic Sen. Andy Kim told HuffPost in June about his party’s anti-corruption messaging. “That message appeals to people who are not just diehard tribal political voters, but to people who have real concerns about both parties and are uncertain about who to vote for.” The Thomas Schmidts, in other words.

 

There are a lot of them out there, especially in  battlegrounds like Georgia and North Carolina. It’s surely no coincidence that Ossoff and Cooper, running in right-leaning states where the center routinely swings elections, have seized on the corruption argument with zeal.

 

Democrats tried something like the corruption argument in 2024 too, of course. Campaigning with conservative Republican Liz Cheney was Kamala Harris’ way of trying to “nudge” right-leaning voters who felt leery of another Trump presidency into following their moral instincts, hoping that Cheney’s endorsement would create a similar permission structure for them to cross the aisle. It didn’t work, and the Ossoff theory explains why: A voter can’t be successfully “nudged” into your column unless he or she is already leaning that way for policy reasons.

 

High inflation, a porous border, and progressive anger at support for Israel’s war in Gaza under Joe Biden ensured that most swing voters wouldn’t be leaning toward Harris on policy in 2024, but toward Trump. He was the one who was positioned to successfully “nudge” voters with moral appeals who were already looking for excuses to vote for him. And he did.

 

A distinction without a difference?

 

In the end, the difference between Brian Poindexter and Jon Ossoff on whether to drill down on an opponent’s corruption in campaign messaging might not be much of a difference at all.

 

Garish though it is, the abuse of which Max Miller has been accused isn’t a form of corruption that bears on the public or on policy. If, as I’ve argued, voters care about a politician’s immorality mostly to the extent that they believe it’s hurting their own bottom line, then Poindexter is probably correct not to focus much on attacking his opponent’s behavior. Give right-leaning voters a policy reason instead to prefer him to Miller and they’ll likely supply their own moral “nudge” to rationalize crossing the aisle based on the lurid allegations about the incumbent in the papers.

 

But in cases where there’s an easy argument connecting a politician’s corruption to policy failures—Trump is too worried about building ballrooms and feathering his own nest to worry about your grocery bill—then you do what Ossoff has done by taking the layup and not thinking twice. Especially when that politician is willing to supply some of the dumbest soundbites imaginable to prove your point.