Billionaires Buying Elections: They’ve Come to Collect - Americans For Tax Fairness
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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 …

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.
  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
    16·
    8 hours ago

    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