Republicans Are Much Much More Corrupt Than Democrats

Democrats perked up to Jon Ossoff’s big Atlanta campaign event earlier this month, taken with how he structured his attacks on Donald Trump.

They were right to be impressed, and I’d commend the whole speech to you if you haven’t already watched it. But I did want to home in on one, somewhat surprising factual error, here:

“This is the most corrupt administration of all time. And everybody knows it. Everybody knows it.”

I say the error is surprising not because I’m surprised it slipped past the people on Team Ossoff, but because it will strike most readers of this newsletter as counterintuitive.

In our world, in the world of high-information voters, the statement is true. Indeed, it is a statement of the obvious. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. Democrats know that Republicans know it, and Republicans know that Democrats know that their apologetics for Trump’s corruption are delivered in bad faith. If you watch a cable-news panel featuring a Republican plant like Scott Jennings trying to muddy corruption questions, or lash out angrily at supposed corruption on the left, that person knows they’re lying, and any co-panelists who engage as if it’s a good-faith debate are also playing a kind of make believe.

Because in this echelon, this is the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it.

But if you pick a person at random in the country and ask him or her, which of the two major parties is most corrupt—a question that’s easily answerable if you already know that “this is the most corrupt administration of all time”—he or she will likely as not say “Democrats.” Or at least say both parties are similarly corrupt.

That is a (to me) infuriating but consistent finding in the data: Trump has at least fought the corruption issue to a draw—and may actually be winning it.

How did this happen? Let’s consider the question together, shall we?...