Ask voters in the country’s most competitive congressional districts what’s wrong with America, and you’ll hear two answers. First, everything costs too much. Second, the government is corrupt.
Ask them which party will actually fix those problems, and you’ll get a shrug.
Corruption now ranks as a top-tier concern alongside cost of living and threats to democracy. Yet, the parties are essentially tied on the question of who will clean up our government — with nearly half saying they trust neither one. That’s the uncomfortable finding from Change Research across 62 battleground districts and an alarm bell in the months leading up to the 2026 midterms.
While the nine-point edge Republicans held on “taking on government corruption” last year is entirely gone, not a single point transferred to Democrats. Yet, momentum is building as a growing wave of leaders embrace an anti-corruption message this cycle. There’s Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost as one example, who has repeatedly spoken out against billionaire-backed companies driving the housing crisis and requiring consumers to subscribe to what they once owned outright. Then there’s those running for Congress like Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who has endorsed a wealth tax on multi-millionaires to “restore balance to an economy that has left working families behind.”
The good news? With nine in ten voters believing corruption permeates every government institution, progressive lawmakers and candidates have a can’t-miss chance to win over voters on the issue. A clear majority of Americans also consistently see corruption as part of the reason prices are high and why they are struggling in this economy. When asked where they feel it, they can already point to what they pay for health care, in taxes, and at the grocery store.
And the best news? This growing wave of progressive populists understand that raising taxes on billionaires is overwhelmingly popular — 77% of voters support doing so, including 71% of Independents and 65% of Republicans.
At a time when billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos crush entire communities to make their next million in a minute, anti-corruption lawmakers need to connect the dots between corruption and voters’ rising cost of living. Our proposed solution is clear: Tax the billionaires to reconcentrate their wealth and reduce their influence over everything from elections to affordability to freedom of the press.
Concentrated wealth buys political influence. Political influence buys policy outcomes. Those policy outcomes show up on your bills and in your daily life as the uber-wealthy consolidate even more power and wealth unchecked, forcing the rest of us to pay more for less as they do. Taxing their extreme wealth becomes not only smart economic policy, but also an anti-corruption tool at every level of government.
Any other anti-corruption reform that leaves concentrated wealth intact would be like trying to stop a flood with a sponge. As long as a few hundred people control more money than entire states, they will always find new ways to buy the rules — new loopholes, new lobbyists, new politicians beholden to billionaires.
Take health care, where Democrats in Congress hold their strongest trust advantage and where voters most clearly feel corruption in their daily lives. Americans know they pay more for prescription drugs, insurance premiums, and hospital visits than the citizens of any other wealthy country. Billionaire-backed private equity firms buy up hospitals and clinics across the country, strip them for parts, and leave communities with higher costs and lower-quality care. Pharmaceutical companies and insurance giants spent decades operating in the shadows and millions in dark money to create this system — and the revolving door between regulators and the industries they’re supposed to regulate.
Housing tells the same story. Billionaires buy up houses and apartments, raising the prices until families are forced to move. Working families across the country are priced out of homes they could have afforded a decade ago — not by accident, but by policy choice. Wall Street landlords, private equity firms, and real estate billionaires spend hundreds of millions blocking zoning reform, weakening tenant protections, and electing politicians who allow them to keep profiteering.
The administration is even leveraging the power of government to enrich the president and his allies in ways once unimaginable. President Trump sued his own government for $10 billion for releasing his tax returns and is still fighting to create a slush fund on the taxpayers’ dime for the wealthy and well-connected who got him elected after widespread backlash.
Every one of those outcomes was paid for, politically, by the same concentrated wealth at the top. As long as billionaires and corporate executives can deploy unlimited resources to protect their power, they will find a way around any rule Congress writes. Taxing wealth at rates high enough to actually shrink the largest fortunes changes what’s possible to buy — and helps eliminate the practices driving up costs for life-saving medication, groceries, and school supplies.
The bottom line is that the affordability crisis and the corruption crisis are one and the same. There’s a version of the 2026 election in which lawmakers not only plainly say what most Americans already believe, but also what they’ll do to tackle the obscene concentration and corruption of wealth at the very top.
That’s what wins in 2026 — and elects a Congress that can actually lay the groundwork for passing a wealth tax in 2029.
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