In this paper, I assess how shifts in voters' awareness of valence issues can not only influence voters but also candidates' strategies. While corruption revelations have been shown to influence citizens' voting, less is known about how outsiders take advantage of the heightened opportunity to enter the electoral race. I construct a novel measure of candidate-level anti-corruption leaning using the registered manifestos of more than fifty thousand mayoral candidates running between 2012 and 2020 in Brazil. I show that outsider candidates are, in general, more likely to rely on anti-corruption appeals. Next, I leverage the revelation of corruption in mayoral accounts in Brazilian municipalities, using the yearly randomized audits conducted by the federal government to test whether outsiders are more likely to take advantage of shifts in the salience of corruption. The results indicate that municipalities exposed to this valence shock experienced an increased entrance of outsider candidates. This paper points at how shifts in the salience of corruption can help overcome outsider candidates' barriers to entry; in doing so, it calls for future research on the possible effects on the prospects of democratic backsliding.