Americans agree about corruption more than they agree about almost anything else.
The corruption gap. The public is ahead of both parties.
Corruption was the single biggest issue of these midterms, bigger than groceries, bigger than petrol. The United States has just recorded its worst-ever score on the global corruption index, and 41% of voters trust neither party to do anything about it.
64/100
The United States’ score on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption
Perceptions Index, published February 2026. Its lowest since the index began,
and 29th of 182 countries. The score has fallen 12 points in a decade,
from 76 in 2015. Transparency International cited weak enforcement of corruption laws,
the use of public office against independent voices, and pressure on judicial independence.
A Decade Of Decline
Transparency International
US Corruption Perceptions Index score
0 = highly corrupt, 100 = very clean. Higher is better, and the line is going the wrong way.
Scores are not directly comparable year to year in a strict statistical
sense (the index aggregates expert and business surveys) but a sustained
12-point fall is well outside the noise. The peak was 76, in 2015.
What Voters Said
October–November 2026
CNBC surveyed 1,000 registered voters, 14–18 October, margin of error
±3.1 points, jointly conducted by Hart Research (D) and Public Opinion Strategies (R).
The Near-Consensus
Where Americans actually agree
Two numbers that should end an argument
93% oppose elected officials personally trading stocks in companies that hold federal contracts.
89% oppose companies owned by a president’s family receiving government contracts.
Almost nothing in American
politics polls at 93%. This is not a divided country arguing about corruption. It is a
country in near-unanimous agreement, represented by a legislature that cannot pass a bill
about it.
What Congress Actually Did
The legislative record
Two things are true at once
The House bill passed on Republican votes, and many Democrats voted against it, because it exempted the president from the ban and carried an unrelated voter photo-ID requirement. The objection was substantive. “Democrats voted against a stock-trading ban” is also a sentence their opponents can say accurately.
The Senate version died at 53–47, seven short of the sixty a filibuster requires. A majority of senators voted for it. It still failed.
Each party blocked a version written by the other. Voters watching this did not conclude that one side is clean.
What Changes In January
And what doesn’t
Honestly: oversight, not legislation
A Democratic House controls committees, and committees control subpoenas. The Oversight Committee stops asking politely.
A Democratic Senate controls the floor and confirmations.
What that does not produce is law. Anything reaching the president’s desk still needs his signature, and sixty votes before that. An anti-corruption statute is not arriving in this Congress.
So the honest promise is disclosure, not reform. The measure of whether the next two years were worth anything is whether the 93% above ever gets a clean up-or-down vote.