Sign up for Dan’s new weekly newsletter and podcast, "Sanity Check," at danschnur.substack.com. Politics… but calmer. And you can read more of Dan’s writing at: www.danschnurpolitics.com.
Jeffrey Epstein is back.
No, not like that. The disgraced financier turned serial rapist is still very much deceased. But as the last weeks of these midterm election turn into days, and these final days turn into hours, it appears that Epstein’s political ghost may end up having an outsized impact on the composition of next year’s congressional majorities.
Even in an election dominated by the economy and affordability, voters’ concerns over government corruption continue to creep up in public opinion polls. Both parties are running hard on this issue, but incumbents are almost always on the defensive in this debate since they are definitionally part of the existing government. In the closing days, this is a discussion worth watching, especially given Epstein’s reemergence as a vote-determining issue.
I have believed all year long that the Epstein scandal has been an under-the-radar topic driving this year’s elections. Voters don’t wake up every morning thinking about Epstein the way they do inflation. And they don’t see daily headlines about Epstein the way they do about more common types of scandal and corruption. But both of these more visible issues reinforce the argument that the “elites” that populists like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders rail against are benefiting from a different set of rules than the rest of us. (This is the same set of emotions that will drive the AI debate for the next several years.)
Democratic candidates are talking more about Epstein, and they are spending far more on ads relating to corruption than Republicans. In total, Democrats have spent $53 million on ads mentioning Epstein in competitive races, compared with $3 million from Republicans. This scandal is much more difficult for Trump and Republicans, given the president’s past ties to Epstein. But Trump and JD Vance did a high-profile event on Medicare fraud last week, and their focus on voter fraud is designed to stir the same suspicions. So the GOP is not letting go of the broader corruption issue either.
The white working-class voters who for the last decade have been the backbone of the Trump coalition are the wild card in this election. Few will vote Democratic, but many of them may stay home. Both affordability and corruption are discouraging them, as are ongoing wars in Iran and Ukraine. The biggest question is whether and how Trump gets them excited to go to the polls.
In 2024, Trump won 66% of the white working-class vote. During his first term in office, these voters supported him in similar numbers even while his overall approval ratings dropped.
But polling from the New York Times last week showed that these voters now give him only a 48% favorable rating and a 46% unfavorable rating, numbers that have remained largely unchanged for most of the last year. Everything Trump says and does between now and Election Day is designed to get these voters excited again.
But while voter fraud and Medicare scams will help with conservative turnout, those issues do not carry even a fraction of the emotional impact and turnout energy of the Epstein scandals. Trump was originally able to use the prospect of investigating Epstein and his web of contacts to excite his base, but his Department of Justice’s mishandling of the controversy and Trump’s own subsequent dismissal of the topic has turned Epstein into a significant net-plus for Democrats.
The broader suspicions of double standards for the economically and politically elite reach far beyond Epstein himself. But voters who feel like politicians are benefiting while their constituents suffer tend to be the angriest, the most motivated, and the most likely to cast ballots in a midterm election. Which makes Epstein an especially target party for a party scrambling to regain its majority.
There are many unknown factors that could determine the election’s final outcome. There’s no question that the Democrats’ tremendous advantages in momentum and energy could lead to a blue wave, but the GOP’s equally formidable financial and organizational benefits could help many of their most vulnerable candidates to succeed. On such a closely contested and volatile playing field, a deceased sex offender could end up deciding where Congress—and the country—heads next.
