Normally voters don’t care about procedural questions. One state and complaint at a time, they’re unlikely to remember or understand sharp dealing from two years before. If one party goes to the electorate complaining about the other’s behavior, it’s usually met with a shrug that all politicians cheat.

But a very clear narrative or popular revulsion — or both — can change that. Examples are found in the Progressive Era around the turn of the 20th century and again in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, when procedural reform gained traction, for better or for worse, and both term limits and campaign finance reform had moments of widespread popular enthusiasm. There’s good reason to think that the next two years offer the opportunity to create such a corruption narrative and to take advantage of what’s likely to be growing revulsion.

President Trump’s administration has made this job easier: The midterm election results showed that its scandals and disgrace have already focused voters’ attention. That’s not the time for retaliation and escalation. It’s the time offer prescriptions for rebuilding the rules that accompany a diagnosis that helps voters make sense of how badly wrong things have gone. Democrats can try to punish Republicans at the ballot box by trying to strengthen rather than weaken democratic norms.

The obvious place to begin is with the White House itself. Proposals to require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns, give teeth to the Emoluments Clause, strengthen anti-nepotism rules that should keep unqualified family members out of sensitive offices, extend conflict-of-interest rules to include the president, and turn blind trust norms into binding rules won’t be hard to understand under Mr. Trump. They will reinforce voters’ distrust of the president while also offering ways to prevent his abuses from becoming standard practice.

Republican procedural abuses at the state level precede the Trump administration, but they can fairly be connected to it. Most important is disenfranchisement. Democrats should emphasize the sustained nationwide Republican effort to limit access to the ballot and offer proposals to restore the Voting Rights Act, end felon disenfranchisement, undo restrictive voter identification rules, ease registration, protect early voting and ensure that voting places are more widely and evenly distributed. Not only has Mr. Trump been on the wrong side of those issues, encouraging state crackdowns on imagined millions of noncitizen voters; but voting restrictions in narrowly won Midwestern states got him closer to the White House in the first place.