President Donald Trump's offer to pay out $5,000 checks if Republicans win belongs to a long political tradition of cash for votes. AP Photo/Mark SchiefelbeinPolitics is about the distribution of power and money. So it comes as little surprise that many politicians campaign on the material benefits that citizens can expect if those candidates win.
President Donald Trump has been no different in this respect. He has promised voters, among other things, a “DOGE dividend” using money saved by cutting federal jobs, rebates from tariff revenues, and a diversion of money currently used to subsidize health insurance companies directly to Americans.
But his pledge to give US$5,000 to every U.S. citizen if Republicans retain majorities in the House and Senate in the November 2026 midterm elections had a different dimension. This offer wasn’t a rebate for taxes paid or a subsidy for an impacted constituency. Instead, it was tied to an electoral outcome. That brings it closer to vote buying, which raises concerns from a legal point of view.
For this to actually happen, it needs congressional approval – and Republican legislators haven’t taken action. But Trump has yet to rescind the idea, which could cost over $1 trillion. So it’s time to ask whether it could make a difference in the midterms, where margins are tight in key races.
I’m a political scientist who has studied for the past decade vote buying in countries around the world. Cash for votes may seem like a straightforward way to win support, but my research shows that offering people money rarely changes their vote.
Why vote buying rarely works
The practice dates back to ancient Rome and was a staple of American political machines from the 19th century to the mid-20th century in New York City, Chicago and states including Georgia, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Virginia.
By diverting public money for partisan purposes, local power brokers cultivated relationships with particular constituencies, such as newly arrived immigrants. Institutional reforms, including the professionalization of government bureaucracies at the federal and local levels, slowly constricted these political machines until the last holdout in Chicago succumbed by the late 1970s.
But in recent decades, vote buying has surged in new democracies, with politicians in at least 73 countries offering cash, food, clothes, building supplies, medical care or legal advice for votes.
If vote buying is so common, it stands to reason that it must work. But a survey of recent research shows otherwise. On average, I have found that the vote-buying attempts across 10 countries and 57 elections around the world have had no detectable influence.
Why are the electoral returns so poor? For vote buying to work, the value of the benefits people receive has to outweigh the factors pushing them toward an opposing party. As in the U.S., voters around the world make their choices based on considerations such as their own partisanship; issue preferences; the performance of the incumbent party; the perceived competence of the candidates; and more. Very few voters in any electorate are truly indifferent.
As long as those factors together outweigh the value of the benefits that people would receive to switch, vote buying fails. And that’s what typically happens, as I explain in my new book, “Against the Machine.”
The importance of competition
There are three specific reasons why vote buying usually flops.
First, local competition creates vigorous campaigns that amp up partisan sentiments. These sentiments influence voters’ responses to electoral gifts. If you already like the political machine, you interpret its gifts as a sign that it cares about your welfare. But if you strongly identify with an opposing party – and therefore are a potential target of vote-buying efforts – you interpret gifts as an attempt to manipulate your vote and deprive you of basic political rights.
This calculation is one reason why vote-buying attempts can backfire, as a vivid example from Mexico shows. In 2018, two vote brokers working for Mexico’s conservative National Action Party were accosted by local voters in Nuevo Laredo. Angry residents stripped the brokers down to their underwear and painted them with the party’s blue color from head to toe, decorating them with the words “Vote for the PAN for 500 pesos.”
In Mexico’s 2018 election, the PAN party, whose flags are pictured here, ran into opposition in Nuevo Laredo due to its vote-buying attempts.
AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
The second reason vote buying often fails is that competitive elections make it difficult for party machines to identify the best voters to target. Strong opposition identifiers react negatively, but weakly opposed voters might trade their vote for a payday. The trouble is that even if local vote brokers can pinpoint these voters before the election, they’re also among the most susceptible to the influence of standard campaigning. That makes them moving targets: Their changing preferences mean that machines end up inadvertently paying voters who either don’t need gifts to vote for them or would need more to actually change their decision.
Finally, even when voters who are good targets get these benefits, they often look for an escape hatch to vote their sincere preferences anyway. The secret ballot provides one if they trust that it’s truly secret.
It turns out that people are acutely aware of who’s watching them vote. When they see poll watchers only from the party machine, they worry that their votes could be discovered by spies, cameras or by other means. But when they also see poll watchers from an opposing party, they believe that ballot secrecy is preserved and that they can vote sincerely without punishment.
Taken together, these reasons have led me to optimistically conclude that the effectiveness of vote buying depends not on the party machine’s prowess but on the strength of the parties that oppose it.
Bringing it home
Vote buying has a checkered recent history in elections around the world, but could the “Trump dividend” swing the midterms? I see that scenario as unlikely.
Partisanship, a core element that makes people resistant to vote buying, is very strong in the U.S. electorate. There’s no need to pay committed Republicans, while committed Democrats will see the offer as a bald monetization of politics that can deepen their antagonism.
The design of Trump’s offer also makes it likely to flounder. Promising to pay everyone gets around the targeting challenge, but it also creates what social scientists call a “free-rider problem.”
At issue is that people tend to behave in selfish ways. If they expect a certain outcome anyway, they’ll make a decision based on self-interest. For example, independents and less committed Democrats who could be swayed by a $5,000 check might think they can avoid feeling like a sellout if they vote sincerely but they will still get paid as long as others switch their vote to Republican.
In theory, there is one way Trump’s offer could succeed. Research shows that buying turnout, rather than trying to change vote choices, is routinely effective. But all the examples come from countries where party officials actively monitor who comes to the polls. Without that surveillance, which is illegal in the U.S., the free-rider problem could bedevil turnout as well.
But whether enacted or not, the promise of cash for votes has a big downside for democracy. It means that no one will know whether victorious Republican candidates won this November because Americans preferred their policies and gave them a mandate – or because they expected to get paid.
Kenneth Greene's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Mellon Foundation.