According to Rolling Stone, despite extensive coverage of President Donald Trump's self-dealing and profiteering off the presidency — from issuing crypto tokens that grant access to the presidency to accepting a $400 million luxury jet from a foreign government — voters slightly prefer Republicans over Democrats on the issue of corruption in a recent poll.
The poll was conducted by Democratic firm Impact Research on behalf of the progressive group End Citizens United.
"On the question of which party was more corrupt ... 49 percent of voters surveyed regard[ed] the Democratic Party as the more corrupt, 44 percent of respondents identif[ied] the Republican Party that way, and just seven percent cho[se] both, neither or equally corrupt," said the report. Moreover, "In a rage-blackout-inducing twist, the polling also found that, despite the staggering, previously unfathomable scale of corruption that Trump has brazenly engaged in since re-taking office, the president’s rating on corruption runs eight points ahead of his approval number in the districts surveyed."
One of the reasons for this, suggested End Citizens United director Tiffany Muller, is that voters just perceive Trump as outside the system.
“What we heard from voters in focus groups was that they give him credit for changing a system that they feel is really broken,” said Muller. “They might not like all of the changes, but they are willing to give him some leeway because he is not coming in and just doing things the same way. And he talks about taking on corruption a lot… His messaging around taking on government waste, draining the swamp, taking on corruption, has maintained some credibility for him on these issues — even while we see him lining his own pockets.”
As all this is going on, however, it's not all good news for Trump.
Polling over the last few months has consistently shown that, while the Democratic Party remains underwater — due in part to frustration from their own voters about their lack of power to fight Trump's policies — they are consistently preferred on the generic congressional ballot, with even the right-leaning RealClearPolitics polling aggregation showing them up 3 points as of the end of July.