Ethical controversies have also dogged Trump and his family from his first day in office, whether it be his refusal to release his tax returns or his use of the presidency to promote his business and properties around the world.

“The challenge for Democrats is not finding a reason to fire the Republican Congress,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who has served in senior roles for the party’s House campaign arm. “It is figuring out which reason—or reasons—is the most compelling in a congested media market often dominated by executive-time tweets.”

Prosecuting congressional Republicans for Trump’s scandals is a trickier proposition for Democrats than it might seem. The scandal that has dominated the headlines and threatens Trump’s presidency—the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia and Mueller’s inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice by trying to stop the investigation—is the one party leaders would like to see their candidates pretty much avoid.

“People think some of this other stuff is a distraction from addressing their other concerns,” Pelosi said in reference to the Mueller probe at a Politico event last month.

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have tried, with mixed success, to tamp down calls for Trump’s immediate impeachment if the party wins back the House. And they have vented their frustration at the at-times obsessive and granular coverage cable networks have devoted to the Russia inquiry at the expense of issues like the new tax law or the GOP’s continued assault on the Affordable Care Act. “Impeachment is a distraction,” Pelosi said, “as are all these shows that talk about the president and the court and the this and the that.”

Top Democrats have tried—without success, so far—to pressure Republicans to act legislatively to protect the Mueller probe. But from a political standpoint, the more mundane reports suggesting graft or the misuse of taxpayer dollars by senior administration officials offer the party an easier opportunity to paint the president and his party as enablers—not drainers—of the D.C. swamp.

This approach, however, is viewed with unease by some activists who worry that the party will miss an opportunity to rally progressives behind an aggressive policy agenda if it devotes too much attention to scandals that don’t resonate with voters. “Democrats cannot try to win the 2018 election on a technicality,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “It can’t be just anti-Trump and it can’t be just Ben Carson’s silverware.”

Democrats initially planned to focus exclusively on the bread-and-butter economic issues—jobs, wages, and health care—that they placed at the center of the “Better Deal” campaign platform they unveiled last year. These include a higher federal minimum wage, paid family leave, stronger union protections, and legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs. But they later determined that they needed to incorporate an anti-corruption, government-reform plank as well. The primary reason, Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland told me, is that they found voters were deeply skeptical that any of their big-ticket economic ideas were possible without overhauling the system.