KEY FINDINGS
- Just 100 billionaire families poured a record-breaking $2.6 billion into federal elections in 2024, one of every six dollars spent altogether by all candidates, parties and committees.
- That’s two-and-a-half times the roughly $1 billion spent by individual billionaire donors in 2020.
- Billionaire political spending is up 160-fold since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowed for unlimited campaign donations.
- The vast bulk of billionaire-family donations went to so-called independent expenditure groups–which thanks to Citizens United can raise unlimited amounts from each donor–rather than directly to candidates or parties, which still work under campaign-contribution limits.
- Billionaire spending heavily favored Republicans. Over two-thirds (70%) of billionaire-family contributions went in support of GOP candidates and conservative causes. Less than a quarter (23%) backed Democratic hopefuls and progressive causes. (The remainder went to committees without a clear partisan or ideological identity.)
- In the three Senate races that gave Republicans control of the Senate, billionaire giving constituted a huge amount of Republican outside spending: Montana 58.1%, Pennsylvania 56.8%, and Ohio 44.5%.
- Almost three-quarters (71%) of the total amount used by outside spending groups to attack the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, came from billionaires. Billionaires supplied over three-fifths (61%) of all the outside dollars spent praising Donald Trump.
- While the potential undue influence on government policy of billionaire donors has always been a concern, the second Trump administration has seen a blatant and unprecedented swapping of campaign contributions for political power, most notoriously in the case of Elon Musk.
- Musk’s 2024 campaign contributions were four times more than what he paid in annual federal income taxes between 2013 and 2018.
- The Trump-Musk attempt to dismantle the federal government and the Republican tax-cutting agenda could potentially save billionaire-family donors trillions of dollars in taxes, turning a huge profit on their 2024 political investment.
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Citizens United is a cancer that should have never been allowed to take root. Very obviously undemocratic and its only purpose it could ever have was to discredit the vote and say of the American People.
Very strange that all this money is needed every four years, like its a business that has nothing to do with electing a candidate or facillitating democratic expression and accountabillity of the parties and politicians involved. Hell of a theatre production, tho
I wonder how much of that money is from billionaires that donated to both parties. I know that the playing both sides bullshit is common in the states.
