How Billionaires’ Political Spending Undermines Our Democracy

When they bankroll electoral candidates to the tune of millions, billionaires claim they are merely exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. And while the Supreme Court and current law might be on their side, their political “largesse” is a dangerous subversion of our democracy.

Our allies at Americans for Tax Fairness recently published a new report, “Billionaires Buying Elections 2024: Congressional Races,” which revealed the massive sums that 150 billionaire families have thus far poured into the 2024 election cycle, with special attention to spending in competitive House and Senate races. For this week’s Closer Look, we’d like to share some of the key findings of the report and explain why billionaires’ spending undermines our democracy.

Here are some of the key findings of the report:

  • As of August 28, just 150 billionaire families had already spent nearly $1.4 billion in the 2024 election cycle. This exceeds the amount that roughly 700 individual billionaires spent in the entire 2020 cycle.
  • Billionaires’ spending overwhelmingly favors Republicans. Across all races, nearly two-thirds (65.6%) of billionaire money has been funneled to conservative candidates, while a quarter (26%) has supported Democrats and progressives.
  • The top four families alone are responsible for more than a quarter (28.5%) of all billionaire political spending. They are, in order: the Mellon family ($165 million), the Griffin family ($75.6 million), the Yass family ($75.4 million), and the Uihlein family ($74.2 million). Their spending has been directed to Republicans.
  • The 150 billionaire families studied have spent $30.5 million on the top ten most expensive/competitive House races. This represents over a quarter (28%) of all the money raised by outside spending groups that have spent over $100,000 per race.
  • Outside spending groups have directed $198 million to the seven most competitive Senate races: Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The 150 billionaire families in the report were responsible for almost half (44%, or $90 million) of it. They were also responsible for no less than 61% of outside spending supporting Republicans in those hot Senate races.
  • The real political spending total of these 150 billionaire families is likely higher than $1.4 billion because billionaires are known to contribute heavily to dark money groups, which are not legally required to disclose their donors.

At this point, you might be wondering, what’s the big deal here? Sure, $1.4 billion is certainly a lot of money for a small handful of billionaire families to pour into the elections, but at the end of the day, don’t they have the right to do it?

Here’s the short answer: yes, the Supreme Court has functionally granted billionaires the legal right to spend as much money in elections as they would like. But this legality carries with it dire implications for our democracy and the concentration of wealth and power in America.

The long answer is that we are starting to see the consequences of enabling monied interests – billionaires or otherwise – to play an outsized role in shaping American politics. The notion that any one person or family can dominate our elections is antithetical to democracy. And yet, an emerging oligarchy is starting to use their extraordinary wealth to effectively decide who can run for office, to catapult their preferred candidates to success, and to lobby sitting legislators they’ve already hand-selected.

How is this happening? It’s not complicated. Funding is one of the most important things – if not the most important thing – that candidates need to run a viable campaign for office. Successful campaigns today require lots of staff, television advertising, polling, political consultants, social media engagement, commercial phone banks, texting and email campaigns, direct mailing, and more – all of which require vast sums of money. And while it’s not always true that the winning candidate is also the biggest spender, there is nonetheless a strong, positive correlation between election spending and election success that cannot be ignored. In short, if a candidate is able to attract significant funding from a billionaire donor to use in their campaign, that will greatly improve their chances of success come Election Day.

This dynamic plays an important role in determining who gets to run for office in the first place. For most people – the exception being those who are wealthy enough to self-finance – getting rubber-stamped by families like the Mellons, Griffins, and Yasses has more or less become a prerequisite for mounting viable campaigns. And this is especially the case as the bar climbs higher and higher in terms of how much money you need to spend to win elections: as billionaires spend more in backing their preferred candidates, other candidates must somehow find similar funds to compete on equal footing. 

Finally, after their preferred candidates win, billionaire donors enjoy outsized influence over how elected officials behave once they are in office. Donors are quite adept at supporting candidates that closely share their views, so it would make sense that, once in office, their beneficiaries support legislation or engage in other activities that are compliant with their preferences.

This also has a lot to do with the fact that wealthy donors enjoy unparalleled access to politicians. A 2015 study found that congressional offices were three to four times more likely to make themselves available for meetings with an organization’s members when they were explicitly told that they were donors. Because politicians spend so much time talking to millionaires and billionaires about their concerns for the country, they eventually come to have a very warped sense of what actually needs legislative attention on Capitol Hill. For example, while most voters are concerned about raising the minimum wage, hedge fund and private equity donors are concerned about protecting the carried interest loophole. The fact that the minimum wage has stood frozen at $7.25 an hour since 2009 and the carried interest loophole is still around today should tell you everything you need to know.

But there’s still one more, very important thing that we need to address in any serious discussion about campaign finance: Citizens United.

Since the 1980s, campaign contributions have become increasingly concentrated among the wealthy, but the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission supercharged this trend. In this decision, the Supreme Court extended the right that individuals have long had to spend unlimited amounts of money on “independent expenditures” to corporations, unions, nonprofits, and other associations. Independent expenditures are political advertisements produced independently of candidates and campaigns that expressly advocate for the election or defeat of specific candidates.

Two months after the passage of Citizens United, a lower court in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission extended Citizens United’s logic further by eliminating contribution limits to PACs that wished to solely engage in independent spending. Thus were born Super PACs, i.e. independent-expenditure-only PACs that can accept unlimited contributions to fund their outside spending activities. Before 2010, it would have been next to impossible for 150 billionaire families to pour $1.4 billion into a single election cycle, but thanks to Super PACs, it’s become very easy.

The five Supreme Court Justices that ruled in the majority in Citizens United claimed they were protecting organizations’ (and subsequently individuals’) First Amendment right to free speech. But by giving outsized attention to “speech,” the Justices neglected the issue of power. We all have the right to purchase airtime on TV to promote our favorite candidates, but in reality, only wealthy people can afford to take advantage of that right. The end result is that, by Election Day, voters have been bombarded with the message of the billionaires’ preferred candidate.

Reforming our campaign finance system will be difficult, but it’s not impossible. There are plenty of steps that Congress can take. They can force dark money groups to disclose the identity of their big-dollar donors. They can pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. And in the longer term, they can move to follow the example of some countries – and even some states like New York – to create a public campaign finance system.

It is only fitting that we close this week’s newsletter with one of our favorite quotes from the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941): “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” If we want to protect our democracy from the malignant influence of 150 billionaire families, we have no other option but to push lawmakers to take decisive action to reform our campaign finance system. 

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