This essay is part of an Election Chronicle series in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. Subscribe to get a copy.
The sheer scale of money in politics is now hard to imagine. Over the last fifteen years, it has transformed dramatically—not just in amount, but in form, as a tiny number of wealthy individuals dominate the market for power. The thesis that the United States had become an oligarchy was mildly controversial when Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argued it in 2014, but it is now indisputable.
According to political scientist Adam Bonica, the top 400 donors to Republican campaigns and super PACs in the 2024 election accounted for more than 60 percent of all funds spent on behalf of Republican candidates—nearly double the share from four years earlier. Meanwhile, the top 400 Democratic spenders accounted for just over a fifth of Democratic spending—much lower than the Republican share, and in line with recent historic norms, but still a staggering level of power for a very few.
All told, during the election, some $3.4 billion was spent on the two major-party candidates through reported channels. Donald Trump’s spending came mostly through “outside” groups, such as super PACs that make independent expenditures, while the majority of Kamala Harris’s campaign spending moved through her campaign. After Elon Musk, head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, whose reportable political spending totaled nearly $280 million, the top spenders overall were Miriam Adelson, widow of casino owner Sheldon Adelson, and Timothy Mellon, grandson of banker Andrew Mellon, a sort of Musk avant la lettre who controlled both a massive fortune and a large swath of government as Treasury Secretary through all of the Republican administrations of the 1920s and into the Depression. Mellon was followed by Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, owners of a packaging company and major funders of groups involved in 2020 election denial. The top seven spenders all supported Republicans exclusively, and six put in nine-figure sums. It’s notable that, with the partial exception of Musk, none are executives of publicly traded or public-facing corporations, suggesting a shift in power within contemporary capitalism.
There’s routine popular outrage at this state of affairs, but remarkably little political will to do anything about it. It wasn’t always this way. A generation ago, the idea of improving American democracy was all but synonymous with the effort to reduce the influence of money and wealth on elections. Bipartisan initiatives to limit “soft money” contributions (donations made to political parties) at the federal level, and to implement public financing of campaigns at the state and local level, were central to the agendas of John McCain and Russ Feingold as much as they were to old-line organizations such as Common Cause, the original “good-government” organization, founded in 1970 by a Republican.
Today, though, the issue hardly registers among elected officials; few other than the diligent Sheldon Whitehouse, Democratic senator from Rhode Island, pay it more than lip service. The bipartisan coalitions that once drove valuable reforms are long gone. The momentum behind comprehensive pro-democracy legislation, including public financing for congressional elections, fizzled out in the first half of the Biden administration. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), the agency charged with enforcing what remains of federal law, has been effectively defunct for at least a decade because of obstruction by Republican appointees. And although voters in Maine enacted a limit on contributions to super PACs in 2024, few other states have done much to limit political spending or to expand public financing.
One reason the cause has faded from view is that so many competing democratic priorities have crowded onto the agenda, from partisan redistricting and voter suppression to election denialism and genuine threats of authoritarian rule and kleptocracy. The docket is packed. Opportunities for progress at the federal level and through federal courts are few.
And earlier, with the emergence of a base of small donors across both parties—particularly the three million individual donors to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign—Democrats and many reformers became complacent that the enthusiastic masses could fund campaigns without the ethical corner-cutting of the Clinton years, when the president was directly involved in raising soft money (something that, in the Trump era, seems as trivial as jaywalking). An optimistic 2010 report by four political scientists, “Reform in an Age of Networked Campaigns,” argued that the emergence of small donors, combined with reforms to introduce public financing, could create a kind of virtuous cycle to offset the political influence of the wealthy. A few campaigns since, such as Bernie Sanders’s two presidential efforts, have reflected this commitment—albeit without the public financing part—but for the most part, the optimism of that moment has faded. Most Democrats and Republicans fell back into the pattern of seeking support from wealthy donors and outside groups.
It is tempting to see the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling as the turning point in the concentration of the market for political influence—and in terms of timing and the anything-goes message the Court sent, it is. More legally significant, though, were the SpeechNOW decision by the D.C. circuit court of appeals, also in 2010, which allowed the creation of super PACs that only make independent expenditures in support of campaigns, and the wholly contrived IRS scandal of 2011, in which Representative Jim Jordan alleged that the tax agency had unfairly scrutinized right-wing nonprofits. That baseless investigation in turn forced the IRS to declare that such nonprofits, known as social welfare organizations, could spend up to half of their budgets on election-related activities. These tax-exempt nonprofits have become a mainstay of “dark money” funding.
But we should resist being nostalgic about the problems and solutions of the 1990s—and about the 2002 law, the McCain-Feingold Act, that the Court partly overturned with Citizens United. As much as we might want to, we can’t go back to that moment. Instead, we need a new way of thinking about the pervasive influence of money and inequality on democracy. True, the issue is now in abeyance—there are few near-term opportunities for change, and it may seem like nothing’s happening—but it’s in such times as these that advocates can develop new ideas, strategies, and coalitions for the moment when circumstances change.
Contrary to popular perception, McCain-Feingold was not primarily about whether money is speech, whether corporations possess free speech rights, or whether corporations are people. (Regulations on money used to disseminate speech are a form of constraint on speech, and corporations do have First Amendment rights, though not necessarily on the same terms as individuals.) Instead, it sought to define the boundaries of an election: What kind of spending should be treated as if it were a contribution to an election campaign, subject to the contribution limits of the Federal Election Campaign Act and a much older ban on corporate contributions?
In effect, campaign finance regulations define a narrow exception to First Amendment rights. Within the boundaries of an election, speech can be limited in the interest of reducing corruption—much like laws that limit electioneering within seventy-five feet of a voting place. But outside the campaign, broader First Amendment rights apply. Reacting to a 1990s messaging tactic—broadcast ads close to Election Day evading regulation by naming an opposing candidate in a disingenuous call to action like “Call Congressman Jones and ask why he always raises taxes,” but not using phrases like “vote against Jones”—Congress specified a criterion for determining whether speech fell within the boundary of an election. If such speech named a candidate at all, it was subject to regulation.
When a right-wing organization called Citizens United put out a pay-per-view documentary called Hillary: The Movie during the 2008 presidential primaries, the FEC thus ruled that it should be considered a campaign expense, subject to limits. Citizens United challenged the ruling, and the Supreme Court rejected the FEC’s decision, finding that communications like the documentary, or ads for it—without coordination with a campaign—fell outside the limits on campaign contributions.
But as partisan and issue polarization has deepened over the last quarter century, the boundary defined by naming a candidate has faded in importance. An ad, mailer, or other communication that doesn’t mention a candidate or party at all—one that solely focuses on an issue—can have as much influence on voters as one that does. And money spent on such communications, along with nudges to social media, traditional media, and the world of niche podcasts, can shape the issue environment to a profound degree.
Indeed, during the 2024 election, one of Musk’s interventions through his America PAC was to circulate a petition asking voters to pledge to support the First and Second Amendments, along with a sweepstakes offering a million dollars to a few signers. The sweepstakes may have been illegal under Pennsylvania law, but the petition itself was an effective way of identifying and targeting Trump supporters—seeding the message that Democrats threaten both those rights without mentioning the election or candidates. Even if the wink-and-nod intent is to influence the election, such a petition, and the money used to circulate it, would certainly fall within the protections of the First Amendment under any interpretation—and should. Other spending to gain political influence—such as the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the Federalist Society and related entities to recruit, promote, and influence federal judges and Supreme Court justices—also doesn’t fall anywhere near the boundaries of an election.
The older reform agenda was based on a model of the role of money in politics in which candidates, and to a lesser degree political parties, were the primary actors. The idea was that candidates need funds to communicate with voters (until recently, by way of costly radio and television ads) and turn to donors—who might be ideological allies, friends or professional acquaintances of the candidate, or parties with an interest in some government decision—for those funds. Desperate for resources, candidates would invite corruption as they solicited these funds, or they would build channels such as soft money to evade legal limits. Either way, the result was an objectionable dependence on donors—what Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig called “dependence corruption”—even in the absence of provable quid pro quo influence on official decisions.
Given this picture of the problem, reformers sought to limit the influence of donors on candidates and elected officials, either through individual contribution limits (the Court in 1974 had ruled limits on total spending unconstitutional), or through some form of public financing that would reduce dependence, such as matching small contributions, providing a fixed grant of funds, or giving every citizen a voucher to donate to the candidates or campaigns of their choice. But as candidates and operatives found new ways to evade the limits, the futility of relying on those limits alone became evident. After that, small-donor public financing came to seem like the only viable solution.
Today, it may no longer be true that candidates are the main actors in campaign finance. The current oligarchy is one in which spenders move and control large pools of political money on their own, attaching themselves to candidates or causes like the mercenary armies of the Middle Ages. There is a reason I use the term “spenders” rather than “donors.” Billionaires are not simply handing money over to politicians and campaigns; they are running their own political operations.
Some are individuals with sophisticated political staff, deploying mostly their own money: the likes of Musk and Ken Griffin for Republicans, Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman for Democrats. Others are super PAC entrepreneurs—pooling money, gaining significant wealth in their own right, and showing little loyalty to candidates. The organizers of one massive super PAC supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primaries moved smoothly over to Trump later in the year. Despite FEC regulations prohibiting coordination between super PACs and campaigns, money can keep flowing through freestanding entities with none of the accountability to voters that parties, candidates, and elected officials (in theory) have.
What is to be done? A reform agenda designed to address this new form of oligarchy could make some incremental improvements.
Public financing should be at the heart of it, to give candidates a way to go more directly to voters. New York City’s small-donor matching system is still probably the best model. Coupled with ranked-choice voting in the primaries, it created a competitive race for mayor in 2021, and it will likely do so again this year (though Mayor Eric Adams’s indictment shows that such a generous system is vulnerable to abuses of its own). Reforms should also try to move money back into political parties, which, unlike the super PACs and their operators, have long-term interests and can be held accountable. (Minnesota’s small-donor program, which provides an instant tax refund for donations up to $75 to both candidates and parties, is a promising model.) And while the FEC may never be able to reclaim its regulatory role as currently structured, the IRS—in a future administration, of course, since Trump’s certainly won’t pursue this—should restore the principle that election-related activities should be no more than incidental to the work of any tax-exempt nonprofit.
But with such concentrated wealth, and with the market for political power in the hands of a few, there’s only so much that can be done in the traditional domain of campaign finance law while still respecting the right to free expression. The problem is no longer “money in politics”; it’s just money. Anything we can do to break its concentration—through taxation, antitrust enforcement, and public ownership of public goods—will help reduce the political power it commands.
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