The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For better or for worse, the narrative in the US is slowly shifting to class differences rather than the usual culture war dog whistle issues. No matter how much the ultra wealthy wring their hands and try to explain their plight, the people are less and less inclined to be sympathetic when they are seeing the full effects of the K shaped recovery we've been in since the GFC.
I feel like people don't want to discuss this because the root cause is likely that people are easily manipulated by ads.
We like to tell ourselves that it doesn't work on us. It does. And the advertisers love that we think it doesn't work, because that means we're not noticing.
And I've got no idea what to do about it. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear that advertising is free speech. You need a fig leaf that you're not coordinating your ads with the campaign, but they barely enforce that.
There are limits to how much it can do. They wouldn't be spending $1B+ this time around if the first few hundred million had worked. They're trying to limit the damage, and even after the fact it'll be hard to tell how effective the spending was -- there is not control country to compare it to.
But note that this is a midterm, and even if the opposition party wins, they're going to be ineffective. Just wait two more years, and that $1.2 billion figure is going to look like petty cash.
The result of this design can be found in studies like https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... :
> When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2026/10/28/tax-wealth...
The key thing here is to look at the trend over time, esp the last few years. There has been a steady rise in support for a wealth tax since the GFC, with a sharp rise in recent years.
Low info voters are very, very bad at dealing with causation. Either for events in the past or events in the future. They tend to follow an algorithm more like "has my life improved recently? Then incumbent, else challenger". Much of the rest is differential turnout. Especially when all the constituencies have been gerrymandered six ways from Sunday.
I guess we'll see in a couple of days. The voter verdict on Trump #2 does not look positive, and this is going to reflect on every candidate with an R by their name.
At least, that's my understanding.
I'd like to see some evidence for that being the reason Harris lost. I know maga was up in arms about it, but they weren't voting for her anyway.
You may consider how many potential voters the Democratic Party has lost through its anti democratic practices. There were no democratic processes to select her as the Democrats candidate. Similarly, Hillary was premiered via “super delegates” that took the vote from Bernie Sanders.
I believe we are seeing a similar fallout in these midterms for the republicans.
It's a small n, but 100% of the Dems I know were elated with the decision to drop Biden.
But I also think US presidents pick bad vice presidents on purpose, and that both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden himself were picked because they were bad presidential candidates.
There are two reasons why you would pick a bad vice president: one, probably the major one, is that the president gets to appease both the vice president's followers (hey, at least we got the vice president!) and the other losing candidates followers to some degree (hey, at least that vice president is so bad, they won't be a shoo-in as the president's successor!)
The other reason is that they want to discourage impeachment and assassinations. You may think that's stupid, but as my rule #1 says, powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe. So even if it is stupid, if we have thought about it, they have thought about it too.
What are you talking about?
Donald Trump #1 is the reason why Iran started the nuclear arm race in the first place https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-iran-deal-then-and-now/
Donald Trump #1 is the reason why Putin got his hands on modern drone technology https://asiatimes.com/2026/02/irans-drones-giving-russia-a-c...
Donald Trump #1 is the reason why there's now a high tension in Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Korea%E2%80%93Unite... https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/17/politics/fact-check-trump...
Donald Trump #1 is the reason why the USA is so dependent on (now more and more expensive) oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_fi...
Donald Trump #1 is (one of) the reasons why Britain went through Brexit https://ukandeu.ac.uk/trump-and-brexit-two-nations-divided/
...etc.
He was definitely not "mostly golfing", he was actively destroying US allies and was actively helping US adversaries, and obvious from the Capitol incident that he already started building a fascist dictatorship.
Now, the damage is beyond repair. The USA is fucked, on a downward spiral that will be difficult(near impossible) to correct.
I don't think that's true. I'd say it was more like a Phantom Menace, like arming a ticking bomb with a postponed effect.
> Now, the damage is beyond repair. The USA is fucked, on a downward spiral that will be difficult(near impossible) to correct.
Yeah. Instead of MAGA, he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years, that's some achievement history will surely remember.
But I don't think everything is lost, although extremely hard and might take at least a century or so to correct (assuming no further damages, that China won't take over and of course that there will still be a human civilization to speak of by the end of the century).
Their perspective is relatively simple. Unhinged, but simple.
They believe the US is strictly incapable of remaining as the sole global superpower, and that due to cultural this and that, risks falling into a middle power or worse. Hence, they want to resuscitate the pre-WW1 notion of imperial Spheres of Influence, in which the world is carved between Great Powers that dominate their surroundings, and to make sure the US stays as one for decades to centuries. The US Sphere would be the Americas plus a small piece of Europe.
For this to work, a few things are needed:
a) The middle powers, and the weak countries, must all learn their place, that they have no real agency, that they must submit to the Great Power that dominates the sphere they're inserted into, and that if they revolt they're going to experience all manners of pain, from economic warfare to actual hot war in their territories.
b) The other strong countries must agree with this project, so although they're enemies on the long run, they must unite in the process of carving the world into those Spheres, and not to interfere too much with the other powers doing their own carving. Any current potential interference (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran etc.) is a piece in the table to be used in negotiating the future frontiers between their Spheres.
c) And, internally, a shared culture, where the majority becomes supportive of this via the indoctrination appropriate to each case for the long run.
That's the gist of it. Everything else, including the public face of the implementation, are details that can be replaced as long as the overall strategy keeps advancing.
a) this isn't going well, Iran just showed the finger to Trump.
b) this isn't going well either, Putin just made a fool of Trump (again). And I'm sure Xi Jinping does not agree either, he has his own agenda.
c) if so, then why destroying the softpower of USA? https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/05/04/trump-soft-...
If really this is their goal, they are doing it very very wrong.
If an agent has goal A, and they believe (strong believe) the way to reach A is via method P, and that any criticism of P is invalid no matter what, they will keep trying P until it arrives as A, since they know P eventually leads to A.
Reality doesn't care about strong beliefs though. If reiterating over P in reality leads to result B, that's what doing P will achieve, always and invariably.
This problem affects an immense number of things. In economics a prime example is Marxism. If you read the goals (A) of Marxism, they're pretty nice, all things considered. The problem is that Marxism (P) doesn't lead to those results, but to a very different set of outcomes (B). And since ideological purity requirements never allow P to be questioned, all it keeps resulting in is B, irrespective of how amazing A would be if P in fact led to A.
With American conservatives in general, and MAGA in particular, it's the same. A, B and P are different, but the dynamic is the same.
> If an agent has goal A, and they believe (strong believe) the way to reach A is via method P, and that any criticism of P is invalid no matter what, they will keep trying P until it arrives as A, since they know P eventually leads to A.
> Reality doesn't care about strong beliefs though. If reiterating over P in reality leads to result B, that's what doing P will achieve, always and invariably.
Yeah, some say that repeating the same thing and expecting different result is the definition of stupidity.
> If you read the goals (A) of Marxism, they're pretty nice, all things considered. The problem is that Marxism (P) doesn't lead to those results, but to a very different set of outcomes (B).
I'm not sure. I mean nobody knows if it could lead to its goal, because Marxism in practice is yet to be seen. What the USSR implemented was not Marxism (and not even Communism), but in fact Leninism and Socialism. This latter is a freaky, twisted, sick version of it with an actual ruling class, no different to the bourgeoisie or the former feudal nobility (Stalin effectively acting like a czar and his inner circle being the new nobles).
> With American conservatives in general, and MAGA in particular, it's the same. A, B and P are different, but the dynamic is the same.
So true. But I would go even further, the actual ideology (P, A) doesn't matter at all. The root cause of the problem, just like you've said, is "ideological purity requirements never allow P to be questioned". When there's no feedback on P (or worse, only false positive feedback given), then this is technically flying blind, no matter what the ideology in question is, the result will surely be an epic fail and fall (since A != B).
There are some kinda-ish modern, more nuanced versions of Marxism that may be more successful than orthodox variants in that. The Frankfurt School had some quite interesting developments there, such as incorporating Freudian psychology through Lacan, but that is itself already very dated by decades. Also, its approach requires abandoning or inverting many premises of orthodox Marxism, such as, for example, by accepting that in many cases it's the superstructure that determines the infrastructure, not the other way around, so they exist in a tensional relation, which leads adepts of orthodox Marxism to call Frankfurtians revisionists and not to want to hear much more.
So I suppose a fully modernized Marxism incorporating everything modern human sciences has to offer could do reasonably well, but it'd be extremely different from both old school Marxism, as well as from the Frankfurtian revisions.
I mean yeah, at the end of the day increasing inequality always leads to unrest and revolt, sure, that's undeniable. Happened numerous times in the past, it is happening in the EU right now, and surely will happen in the future too. But I don't believe this can be solved like Marx imagined, even with psychology and neuropsychology added to the mix.
IMHO a strict, exhaustive, well thought-out, rule-abiding system with rock-solid breaks and balances is necessary at a minimum, not unlike how Solon and Cleisthenes reformed the entire system in ancient Athens. Demokratia was very different to today's democracy, it was an air-tight system that covered all corners without any loopholes. For example, voting was considered a work, therefore voters got paid (which made vote-buying futile, making the whole process corruption-free), and thanks to public lottery it was impossible to bribe or persuade the judges, as nobody knew in advance who they will be. It was a system that aimed for rights must not be influenced by wealth and status (which is the total opposite of today's democracies, where only the wealthy can run for presidency and have a say in lawmaking, not the common people).
IMHO fighting inequality can't be based solely on some ideology (maybe with psychology on top), but must be a multi-disclipinary effort covering all aspects of society like in demokratia. I'm not sure if even this could succeed (Greeks failed after all), but I'm sure without it will just reproduce the vicious cycle that Marx spoke of.
Oh, sorry, we have derailed the topic a bit, hope other readers don't mind.
When it comes to the economic side of things, I believe the best approach right now is to learn all major schools: mainstream economics plus Keynesianism, Libertarianism, Marxism, Distributism and at least a handful of minor ones. That helps to untie one's mind from holding too strong beliefs in what still isn't a science but at some point maybe become one.
On the political one, I fully agree. In fact, I wish lottery was used extensively, including for executive roles. There's research showing it results in way better outcomes all around, as politics ends up somewhat close-ish to having traits similar to the average of a population, rather than lower than it, as in other models. Alas, getting there from here is almost impossible. Too bad.
Also it wouldn't hurt the economy if it were based on actual math. At the university I had to learn micro and macro economy (thankfully just one semester each), and my book was full of impossible things: graphs without units, confused linear and exponential trends, obviously wrong greater-than and less-than relations...
> On the political one, I fully agree. In fact, I wish lottery was used extensively, including for executive roles. There's research showing it results in way better outcomes all around, as politics ends up somewhat close-ish to having traits similar to the average of a population, rather than lower than it, as in other models.
I think it should not necessarily be the average of a population. For example, executive roles could be chosen randomly from a pool of people with suitable curriculum. Or a judge for a case from a pool of available judges, etc. This would make wonder for audits and fighting corruption, as long as the lottery is fair and public.
But no matter how good a system is, if a small wealthy group can overrule the Founding fathers' breaks and balances with a simple Congress hearing, well, then that system is hopeless and surely doomed to fail. Rules that oligarchy must obey and can't twist to their liking is essential for democracy, otherwise tyranny emerges. Ancient Greeks knew this, and we can clearly see that they were right.
On politics, agreed!
I mean after all economy is all about money, measured in numbers: stock prices, exchange rates, interest, balances, income, etc. numbers and numbers and numbers all over, everywhere.
Shouldn't math be the most important thing of all in a field entirely made up by numbers? How come it's not? Isn't that a bit strange?
IMHO Adam Smith was a conman, so no wonder that economists are too. Free market leads to best products at smallest prices? Just look at any real world market: profit maximization is all about oppressing and killing the competition, cutting expanses (so producing poor quality goods), sold as expensive as possible. Reality is literally the opposite what Smith said. Again, IMHO.
Suppose you have $3 in hand, and you want a printed issue of the NYT. You take your $3, give it to the newsstand owner, and he gives you a NYT issue.
Why did this exchange happen, rather than no exchange at all?
From your perspective, because you value having a printed issue of the NYT more than keeping your $3, otherwise you'd have kept the $3 and not bothered.
From the newsstand owner, because he values having $3 more than maintaining that copy of that NYT issue on the stand, otherwise he'd have refused your money.
So in the exchange both sides perceive it as increasing their respective satisfaction, so both profitted from it.
Hence, the question on which is worth more, the bills and coins amounting to $3, or the printed issue of the NYT, is meaningless without adding a necessary qualification or "for whom".
That very basic weirdness is inherent to all monetary exchanges, and it builds up from there when we move to aggregates.
PS: Adam Smith didn't say much of what's attributed to him. The "invisible hand" metaphor was something he remarked en passant as a side note, and it wasn't in any way a core part of this theory. In fact, if we read him we find a lot of criticism of the worst parts of Capitalism. His criticism of rent seeking, for example, is brutal, and he was a strong supporter of free public schooling paid for by the State, among many other things.
A very nice author, with good ideas amidst bad ones, unfortunately utterly distorted by his so-called "supporters" who didn't actually read his works.
Exactly the kind of smokescreen I was talking about. "Perspective", "profit of the customer"? All non-sense, deliberately trying to derail you. What matters here is: how much did the newsstand owner pay for the NYT copy and how much did he get by selling it. Basic, elementary school level algebra, nothing more. That's all there is.
> Adam Smith didn't say much of what's attributed to him.
Yes, I know. But he undeniably did say that "free market leads to the best products for the smallest price", that's the core of The Wealth of Nations, and it's all a lie (we can easily see that by looking at the real world, free market leads to monopoly, which is the opposite of healthy competition).
> unfortunately utterly distorted by his so-called "supporters" who didn't actually read his works.
Yeah. This always happens. How come Jesus saying "you must love each other" became distorted as "kill each other in holy crusades"? Or that Marx's "no ruling class" theory was turned into the Kremlin?
Regardless I still think Smith was a conman, because I think he was smart enough to realize his core ideas were a lie. His ideas can only work if all goods were equal, which is hardly true in real life (actually companies do anything to make their product different from the competitors', and if they can't do that, then they bribe, sue, acquire etc. so they do anything to make their product the one and only on the market).
In other words Smith was talking about selling chicken eggs but made it look like if those principles were true for selling any kind of goods, and I'm certain he was well aware of this lie. He was simply too smart to make this error by mistake.
> he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years
America is still the most powerful military force and the largest economy, and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots. A beast that size keeps lumbering a long time after brain death.
Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore. Ignoble but not ignorable.
If we run the clock forward, then declining arms exports due to sovereignty concerns wool make the USian defence industry harder to sustain. But that takes decades to play out.
Not true (not anymore). China always had more manpower for recruitment, their current navy fleet is already bigger (64 submarines both, but 4 times as many ships than USA), moreover Chinese fleet is top of the line and brand new, while USA's is old and rusty. Chinese are way ahead in space too. God knows what technology they have in their military satellites and in Tiangong. They have already demonstrated (potential) military maneuvers in space that US military is just dreaming of. https://interestingengineering.com/beyond-earth/shijian-chin...
> and the largest economy
Not true either. https://economicsinsider.com/largest-economies-with-highest-... China's economy is not just bigger, but the USA is indebted to China. Badly. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080615/china...
> and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots.
Which does not really do much, and as a matter of fact, places where they carry water from wells are subjugated by Russian militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Afr... or are hopelessly indebted to China https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-m... USA has already lost being a power in those places.
> Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore.
I'd argue that other nations are now working on solutions to exclude the USA as much as possible on every front possible, so basically to ignore. Agreed, they are not there yet, but they are actively working towards to that goal so they will be there (and sooner than later). The problem with loosing trust is, they will look for alternatives, and once found, they won't switch back, even after Trump's long gone. Regaining trust is much harder than loosing it.
FYI, Trump's f*ckup is much bigger than you realize.
I'm not a military buff, but a couple of tubers say that China's navy includes a lot of coastal tonnage.
In China's favour, they seem to be getting more R&D "purchasing power". Against them, the demographics. The space race is wide open. I could believe they have the space military advantage, but frankly, if you can lift tonnage into space then you can drop tonnage onto cities from orbit.
Do not underestimate the power of Hollywood to set the frame for political conversations everywhere. Apart from anything else, immigration is America's safety net against demographics.
I'm not sure if there's one explicit crossing point. All I see is, as time passes China is gaining on the USA in more and more fields. I'm not sure if they already have the advantage in most fields, or in the most important fields, but if things do not change, they surely will.
> I'm not a military buff, but a couple of tubers say that China's navy includes a lot of coastal tonnage.
Could be. But it's worrying that they have 4 times as many ships and numbers are growing.
> In China's favour, they seem to be getting more R&D "purchasing power".
Not just that. I can't cite any scientific paper in the last decade which does not have at least one Chinese name as its author. They got the know-how while USA was paying the bill...
> The space race is wide open.
Maybe. But only China is able to sustain its own space station, nobody else.
> Do not underestimate the power of Hollywood to set the frame for political conversations everywhere.
Not any more. Since Scientology took over and brainwashed people started writing the scripts, everybody is laughing at Hollywood and their expensive but shitty movies (just take a look at box office numbers outside of the USA). And the last nail in their coffin was the rise of streaming, Hollywood has already lost its power too. https://planetoffilms.com/hollywood-box-office-failures-2025...
> Apart from anything else, immigration is America's safety net against demographics.
And also the reason for its success. Von Neumann, von Brown, Einstein, Pulitzer, Schwarzenegger, Natalie Portman, Henry Kissinger, Nikola Tesla, Rupert Murdoch, hell, even Elon Musk is an immigrant.
Thanks to Trump and it's ICE rampage, now great minds are literally fleeing the USA. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-scientists-ar... Again, by loosing these people USA will surely loose the advantage in R&D too, if haven't lost it already.
All in all, the trends not looking good.
Like Iran didn’t retaliate for US assassinating their leaders in term 1.
But also because every day builds on the previous one. His first year he hadn’t figured out he could use CBP (ICE) to remove US citizens from protests but by year 4 he had figured it out.
Musk largely dumped the money into the election to prove to everyone he can keep dumping money perpetually into every election. Its a pain to deal with $400 Million this year, but can you imagine 2028, 2030 or 2032? Its going to be a constant onslaught until we figure out a way to mitigate Citizens United vs FEC
Even if Democrats win, Musk has proven that his money is now part of our political system moving forward.
Of course the Supreme Court will change its mind about executive powers soon after the next election, because they are an impartial body dedicated to the abstract intellectual pursuit of discovering the true intent behind 250-year-old sacred documents.
(Judge unconstitutionally refuses to accept appointment of other judges, situation escalates into a proper physical "lock the doors vs storm the building" conflict.)
I assume the /s was implied?
If you think voters’ minds are so feeble that they can be swayed by propaganda, then the problem is the voters, not the propaganda. Anyone so easily manipulated can’t be trusted to decide who is in power. It is incoherent to endorse restrictions on free speech while also supporting universal suffrage.
Total UK spend in 2024 was about £70m or about £1 per citizen. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
> It is incoherent to endorse restrictions on free speech while also supporting universal suffrage.
Even in the US free speech does not allow you to simply sell fraudulent goods and services. There has to be some sort of defense in the system against lying, or the entire process just turns into competing to write the worst fantasy about your opponent.
Both of these examples are nowhere close to the power given to the government before Citizens United: a censor who chooses what people are allowed to read or hear in the months before elections. Unlike copyright or contract law, the punishment was before the fact, not after. And it applied to films people paid to see, not just ads.
> If you think voters’ minds are so feeble that they can be swayed by propaganda
Buddy, advertising works, there is a reason why coca-cola does it.
You're saying you want Trump's FEC to decide what ads can be shown during a football game. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.
Historically:
We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.
Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.
Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.
I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.
I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.
We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.
I like how you put this. I feel the same. Effectively too self-aware and intelligent as a species still hooked into the same primitive nervous system as our ancestors and animal cousins.
I don't think it was that the lower class was disenfranchised, it was that disenfranchising them made the petty nobility comparatively over-enfranchised.
This isn't exactly a hot take. All those memes about good times and weak men resonate for a reason. The British hereditary nobility did better, a little, but also were very much not great.
And of course there's a pretty obvious parallel between these groups of people the the professional managerial class in modern western societies that lack a rigid social class.
Humans are inherently irrational, but that doesn't mean they can't make good decisions as a group [0].
But we can also be convinced to not trust our own eyes, at least in the short term.
[0]The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004) is a great book covering this idea.
It's not a boolean; if you try to make it one, it is quickly apparent that there's no such thing as a totally rational human being. And I don't just mean amongst the electorate, I mean you won't even find one working as a professor of rational logic in a university of mathematics and philosophy.
So no people are influenced by everything, saying otherwise is preposterous, it's how we found out about PTSD which we didn't even believe at first to be psychological but physical hence the name shellshock.
The question is how much and what are the ultimate effects of the daily exposure to something.
Propaganda works even without free votes, this is why dictatorships still bother with it.
Unfortunately this is a non-trivial problem; I don't know if Hacker News has a size limit on comments, but whole books can be (and have been) written on this topic and its implications for democracies, more for the implications for dictatorships, and yet more for the implications for free trade and capitalism.
Firstly, consider how freaking adaptable humans are. Even though you would hate moving somewhere with really poor living conditions, you would get used to some degree of it within several months or years. People have health problems they… just kinda get used to and ignore (which causes them problems down the road).
My point: it’s part of being human to adapt to your environment.
So here’s the problem: if you have enough money, you can influence other people’s environments. Specifically, their information environments. If your information environment is extremely negative and stressful, you’ll tend to feel more negative and stressed too.
And not to mention, have you heard about how the human brain is so susceptible to addiction when technology manipulates dopamine response? So social media companies are also manipulating your attention by spending money.
This isn’t some personal failing in you or me or anyone else. This is billionaires and tech giants manipulating very normal aspects of humanity to make more money and control politics.
Like, you’re seriously telling me there’s nothing wrong with billionaires buying up and merging nearly all of the media companies and newspapers in America? It’s just our feeble brains that are the problem?
Give me a break. The problem is that because of technology, anyone with enough money can very easily manipulate and influence the information we consume and the media we’re attentive to.
That gives a small number of people frankly too much power in a society. And your argument is that whoever “figures out” this hack of… having a lot of money… should have the right to control elections, because humans can’t be trusted.
I personally find that argument incoherent.
The real question is: why exactly should a society put up with a power dynamic that gives 99% of people less power and worse lives?
Furthermore, we can look at other democracies (Briton, Australia, Canada, France, Germany) and see how their campaign finance laws work in contrast to ours, as well as the level of debate / manipulation that occurs in those countries. Most are in agreement that SuperPACs would be considered full scale corruption in other countries.
Interesting that you ignore everything of substance in the excellent good-faith responses to your comment, especially the actually interesting parts in discussing new information outside your existing worldview. I can't see what picking up on a separate and almost irrelevant point to counter by declaring a non-obvious outcome, without giving any reasoning, achieves.
It's been 100 years since such a view and attitude towards people was popular.
Had Citizens United gone the other way, do you think Trump would have won?
If Citizens United gone the other way, would Elon Musk be contributing $350 million in 2024 and $400 million in 2026?
Super-billionares / Trillionares are now favored by our political class because of Citizens United. Donald Trump, if he won, would have been off the backs of working class people and the whole Elon Musk / DOGE thing, as well as the whole Ukrainian Starlink disruption thing, probably would have never happened.
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The person on the throne matters far less than the system that surrounds the throne. Yes the person matters a little bit, but the system forces people into a specific shape. And will continue to force our leaders into that shape as long as we continue this system.
What system? Seriously, there are infinite number of systems, it's not a binary choice despite what the ms media and some politicians are claiming.
Unfortunately a large part of that "wasted" money supports and feeds the underbelly of treasonous madness spewing peopogandist monsters, that also in many cases have kids to feed, college to pay for, and perhaps some ferraris to buy.
The Dems are kind of famous as the consultant class party and New Republic had a very good recent article pointing out what a massive spendy ecosystem this all is! They attribute 73% of all donation money as going to consultants. Not ad spends not staff or travel. https://newrepublic.com/article/216304/consulting-class-eati...
My gut expectation is that maybe it's not quite such a large base of so so many consultant shops, but that the GOP side is even more good ole boy networks with even more grift and even more very very well paid propogandists, willing to spin and spew the ridiculous anti-social fearmongering din they flood us with. This is a hop alway but the GOP has been in full grifter mode for a while now, and I expect the same below as we find above. Kristi Noem managed to spend $220m on a video promoting border security, with way less than a million for the shoot itself and $143m going to the primary, Safe America Media. Or the DHS radically overpaying for warehouse internment camps. https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/prairie-cor... https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campai...
These are bolder grift within the government itself, not SuperPACs which presumable are somewhat more effective. But I feel pretty strongly it's likely the din producing monsters are getting incredibly filthy rich from selling out America to these plutocratic insurrectionist Business Plot monsters. This money is alas fueling hell itself.
To give a million to any party you have to pay 2 in tax.
Musk dumping $360M into a political race is trivial to him. Making it cost three times as much to make the donation isn't a huge factor.
Making contributions have an impact on the donors total wealth will democratize these massive campaign spends.
I don't know why this wouldn't be reasonable for the USA.
However in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations (including so-called Political Action Committees) and unions cants have their expenditures capped. A subsequent decision in SpeechNow.org ruled that contributions to these PACs can't be capped, as long as the PAC doesn't coordinate with a candidate.
So here we are. I'm not sure if taxation on these types of contributions would be considered limitation of free speech, but I'm willing to give it a shot in courts.
All of that money should go to lower funded candidates so spending above the limit becomes self defeating. Republican mega donors might end up supporting a small communist party more than their own.
1- https://www.fec.gov/data/raising-bythenumbers/ 2 - https://academic.oup.com/psq/article/140/3/439/8157144?utm_s...
Dunno what is wrong with your numbers, but they're significantly undercounting, and likely [deliberately] excluding all the SuperPAC money that Republicans got from megadonors.
(Musk alone spent $290M on the 2024 election, so your $0.2B number is ludicrously low)
It’s true that there were very high individual contributions during the 2024 election cycle and I think this could be somewhat attributed to the assertion that these donors face a targeted existential threat and as self interested actors they’re contributing to candidates who will mitigate risk and impacts.
I also did notice that between 2022 and 2024 there’s a flipping of the script where George Soros in 2022 was the top donor (1) but was then replaced by a donor for the Republicans in 2024. Of course I think the top donors always make themselves subjects for management at newspapers to delegate to their employees to report on. We can ask why the script flipped, perhaps the Democrats have been losing wealthy donor or perhaps the Democrats had a fragile strategy that depended on a wealthy donor who transferred power to his son who donates less.
I think the best question to ask is “How do we as Americans ensure that each individual voter has the fairest voting power and has equal and sufficient access to relevant information and is educated enough to make an informed voting decision with sufficient judgment.”
1 - https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-hub/contributors?tab=b...
Edit - sorry he's there, but showing as the 13th highest raising candidate w/ $3.8MM raised (compared the $2.3B from the Democratic incumbents).
Which underscores the point - most of the money being deployed for that candidate isn't reflected in those numbers.
There is no hard cap and no limit on doing things that don't cost money so no one is ever prevented from speaking (that would open censorship challenges). It doesn't need to survive strict scrutiny because all candidates are treated equally making it viewpoint neutral topic discrimination. And Congress has a long established power to tax basically anything they want.
Or it creates an entirely new problem. People like this don't just go away after hitting a single roadblock.
Federal regulation would make a mess of the idea due to preemption, eliminating the state regulatory option and leaving us with just the federal options of a Constitutional amendment or impeaching/replacing the Supreme Court and repudiating their openly corrupt precedent (decree).
If we just change the rules, the game will stay exactly the same? Sorry, but this awfully naive.
The current court is completely partisan and has zero judicial theory other than backing partisan power and oligarch power. They have the final say on how to interpret the constitution but reject the founding principles of the USA.
That said - yes, they need anti corruption / bribery regulation, fixed terms, and those terms to be co-prime wrt political fixed terms.
* https://www.abc.net.au/science/archive/articles/2001/11/27/4...
There's a free speech issue to saying "you can't advertise your own opinions". Where is the line? Should every charity that "raises awareness" be banned? Should every sponsored Youtuber be forced out of political commentary? (I mean, I don't hate the idea completely ....)
There's the skeezy links behind organisations that support a political stance, and claim no real links to politicians. But we know that it's all kinda bs with strong links between the "nonaffiliated" "Political Action Committees" that claim to just represent causes and ideas, and the politicians who just happen to be close friends with the organisers. But it's rarely totally black and white.
There's a free speech issue to letting money make someone's speech be heard louder than others, making most other people's speech technically free, but inaudible.
Most countries have limitations on the broadcasting of political opinions and candidate support for periods before elections.
These laws don't work as well these days with the importance of social media (and it's mostly the same rich Americans that take advantage of this to meddle into European affairs) but at least the principle is there, while I think the fundamentalist way that the US interpret "free speech" prevents anything from being doable at all to curb the undue influence in politics that money can give.
Indeed, as the UK is finding out at the moment, the existing rules are insufficient and it's turning out that a rule is only a rule if it is enforced anyway.
Allow civil suits when promises made aren't kept.
no more PACs. limit ad-runs to two a day.
because the ads are just lies and hogwash - they don't even spread ideas or inform voters.
SUPER PACs are the "issue." These are outside entities which are "campaigning" in some way (see: advertising). These are legally entities outside of the candidates campaign. You simply cannot stop an entity from saying "Vote for x candidate" or "Y candidate wants to kill your puppies" without violating the 1st amendment.
Example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/oct/...
Helluva world we’ve written ourselves into.
Maybe the newspaper of record also got distracted on the way to saying it because they treat the effect of elections as irrelevant and report on it like they're talking about drafting players for the NBA.
In that context, no politician with perfect integrity can be successful. People with information but who lack nuance will always be outraged that their candidate sold out.
When you sarcastically call politicians scum, it adds no fucking information. The politician that you like cannot exist.
I have no difficulty with condemning anyone who joined Epstein in his crimes. I also have little difficulty in tolerating anyone who worked with him while unaware of his crimes. In between, there's an enormous grey area based on whether or not you shun people based on rumour. How many rumours went round your school, and how many of then did you believe?