Corruption is often claimed to play a central role in elections. Previous studies have tended to assume the experience and perception of corruption affects all voters equally. We highlight both key variations (in terms of how much voters care about corruption and parties’ corrupt behaviour) and the benefits of seeing the impact of corruption less in binary terms and more as a sliding scale. Drawing on specially commissioned polling data, we find the more voters care about corruption the more they vote for clean parties, that parties are tainted by their corrupt coalition partners, and that anti-corruption stances trump ideological appeals. The findings indicate the merits of using large-scale polling data to examine the motivations of voters in cases where corruption is assumed to play an important role in elections.