Marty Levine
October 31, 2024
Yesterday, just one week before election day, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) published a study on the cost of this election season. It leads off with this disturbing piece of data:
With a week to go before Election Day, just 150 billionaire families have already smashed the billionaire campaign-spending record, contributing $1.9 billion in support of presidential and congressional candidates, a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) released today found. That’s $700 million, or almost 60%, more than the $1.2 billion spent by over 600 individual billionaires during the entire 2020 campaign, the most recent with a presidential contest. Typical flurries of last-minute fundraising will undoubtedly drive this year’s final total even higher, probably well over $2 billion.
(Here’s a link to a spreadsheet with all of the details.)
In September Open Secrets offered this estimate of how much would be spent in total across the country and from top to bottom on our ballots:
With weeks left until Election Day, OpenSecrets predicts that 2024’s federal election cycle is on track to be the costliest ever, with a total cost of at least $15.9 billion in spending. This will surpass the 2020 cycle’s record-smashing total of $15.1 billion.
150 families are rich enough to provide almost 12% of total amount of the money is electing our national, state and local leadership.
Open Secrets gave us an even more disturbing picture including how the ultra-wealthy totally overwhelm the impact of millions of men and women who are small donors (up to $200):
The top 10 individual donors have contributed $599 million – 7% of all money raised – thus far for the 2024 cycle. Extending the list to the top 100 donors shows that they account for 16% of all fundraising, and extending it further to the top 1% of all donors accounts for a full 50% of all money raised. In contrast, all donors giving under $200 account for just 16% of all money raised.
“The total fundraising from small donors, as an overall percentage of fundraising, has hovered around 20% for several presidential cycles with a notable uptick in the 2020 cycle. “
And if you have any doubt about where these ultra-wealthy families believe their bread is buttered take a look at this chart:
This is not surprising since the current Republican Party is the outcome of decades of effort to shape our nation in a manner that will allow the ultra-rich to protect and expand their wealth.
They have used their influence to shape our tax policies to benefit themselves. They have used their influence to shape our charitable sector so that it can be used in service of their self-interest. And they have shaped our rules for regulating political contributions to allow this distortion to get increasingly worse. Year by year we have seen the share of national wealth becoming increasingly concentrated in a small sliver of the population. Year by year we have seen this wealth being used to distort our democracy.
Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. It is one of the most obvious and disturbing consequences of the growth of billionaire fortunes, as well as being a prime indicator that the system regulating campaign finance has collapsed,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “We need to rein in the political power of billionaire families by better taxing them and by effectively limiting their campaign donations. Until we do both, we can only expect the influence of the super-rich over our politics and government to escalate.
If you need more proof of how destructive the combination of great wealth and weak constraints on political spending just watch in real-time as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has inserted himself into the world of electoral politics. He has contributed over $100 million. He has used his ownership of X (nee Twitter) as a megaphone to amplify messages designed to boost his candidate, Donald Trump. What more needs to be said about how toxic this mix is?
Fixing this will not be easy. The floodgates were opened by a Supreme Court that has been groomed to be receptive to these special interests as it ruled on the infamous Citizens United case in 2010. That will have to change before a Congress and A President can get down to the work of crafting a new system of campaign finance that protects political speech but breaks the connection between money and speech.
Are we too late? I don’t know but I am going to keep pointing out this problem and keep working to get this fixed.
