Billionaires Want to Buy This Election. It Isn’t Working.

Two weeks from now, the midterm elections will deliver an explosion of narrative meaning: about the country and its future, the president and his movement and his legacy. But the election cycle has already taught us a couple of very important things about money’s place in our democracy.

One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.

Let’s take the first point. This election will be the most expensive in history, with more money projected to be spent on political advertisements than even during the presidential campaign of two years ago. And though President Trump’s popularity is at historic lows and the Republican Party regularly registers tsunami-scale deficits in polling, Republicans are actually leading in the overall spending race. How? According to calculations by The Washington Post, the four biggest donors this cycle (including groups, nonprofits and firms) have given to Republicans, as have seven of the top ten. The single largest donor, Elon Musk, has donated 3.6 times as much money as the biggest Democratic donor, George Soros, and is almost single-handedly bankrolling Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate race in Texas against James Talarico, as my colleague Teddy Schleifer reported last week.

In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.

The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.

This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.

Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.

Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.

By David Wallace-Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ibrahim Rayintakath

[ed. The party of grift overplayed its hand. But, never underestimate the gullibility of the American public.]