Category Archives: campaign finance

“How billionaires took over American politics”

campaign finance

Washington Post offers a long profile and striking charts along with a second article that maps who the top 20 most politically influential billionaires are. The thesis and argument are short and sweet and, of course, there are great graphics.

“The concentration of wealth among the richest Americans is unlike anything in history — and so is billionaires’ influence in politics.”

And sometimes, despite their wealth, they still don’t get what they want: Zohran Mamdani’s defeat in NYC–showing once more that political organization can be an important counterweight to money in politics. Still we should be concerned:

“[A]t least 17 billionaires, collectively worth more than $1 trillion, claimed coveted seats in the Capitol Rotunda” on Inauguration Day. “The three richest men in the world — Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — took places of honor next to Trump’s family.”

“Billionaires didn’t acquire their influence in D.C. overnight.” Presidents from Bill Clinton to Barak Obama courted them.

Still, “Trump’s Cabinet is the wealthiest in U.S. history, with a combined net worth of $7.5 billion, according to Forbes. That’s more than double the $3.2 billion net worth of Trump’s first Cabinet and 64 times the combined wealth held by Biden’s Cabinet.”

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“Advisory Proxy Resolutions Are More Important than Ever”

campaign finance

Karl Sandstrom, Senior Advisor to the Center for Political Accountability and a former member of the Federal Election Commission, and Bruce Freed, President of the Center for Political Accountability, have released this short statement in response to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman, Paul Atkins’s recent push to eliminate advisory proxy resolutions that seek to discipline corporate political spending and preserve board oversight.

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“Dark money groups pour cash into fight over gerrymandered Missouri congressional map”

campaign finance, redistricting, referendum

Missouri Independent reports:

Voters across Missouri late last week received a text message urging them to take their names off petitions they may have “accidentally signed.”

The message, labeled as the work of the Republican National Committee, dropped the name of Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, saying he had “declared TENS OF THOUSANDS of petition signatures IMPROPERLY COLLECTED.” The text, from a number in southwest Virginia, gave a number to call in southwest Missouri to withdraw a signature.

The number, when called, goes straight to a voice mail system and promises people who leave a number that they will be called.

The mass text was the latest maneuver in the fight over Missouri’s gerrymandered redistricting map, which is drawing millions in donations from dark money groups on the right and left — including $2 million over the weekend from a pair of Republican nonprofits. The deadline is approaching for opponents of the map to submit signatures to force a referendum while the question of which signatures to count and whether a referendum is even possible remains mired in state and federal courtrooms.

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Issue One Reveals New Evidence of How Big Pharma Plays the Political Dark Money Game

campaign finance

A Press Release from Issue One provides evidence from tax filings showing how big pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer, use their trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (“PhRMA”) to funnel money to dark money groups that support Republican candidates.

“One of the largest contributions detailed in the new filing is $4 million given to the American Action Network, a dark money group aligned with House Republican leadership that has spent significant sums over the years to bolster House Republican candidates.”

Tax records reviewed by Issue One indicate that between 2019 and 2024, PhRMA did not contribute to the two largest dark money groups on the Democratic side, even as it contributed to candidates and political groups on both sides of the aisle.

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“Why Curtis Sliwa Stayed in the Race—and the Billionaires Who Tried to Buy Him Out”

campaign finance,

Time has a new story on big money in New York City politics.

“In the final stretch of the New York City mayoral campaign, Curtis Sliwa says he was offered $10 million by a group of unnamed billionaires to drop out of the race and clear the way for Andrew Cuomo—so great was their fear of a Zohran Mamdani victory.”

Sliwa, apparently, dislikes Andrew Cuomo about as much as New Yorkers do, however, and refused.

“I keep referring to him as a Prince of Darkness, that’s a clue. I know how he operated. I used to deal with the Democrats, and they were in fear and fright of Andrew. He would hold vendettas, blood feuds and he would be unmerciful. ”

Time ran the story, although it could not independently verify Sliwa’s account.

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“Architects of Online Influence: How Creators, Platforms, and Policymakers Shape Political Speech”

campaign finance, campaigns, cheap speech

Important new report from CDT:

A social media creator gave gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars to Donald Trump during a livestream ahead of the 2024 presidential election. A progressive influencer ranted in a video that other creators were allegedly paid to attend the Democratic National Convention, while he was not. Half of TikTok users between ages 18-29 use the app to keep up with politics.

This report explores the growing role of political influencers in our democracy and how they fit — or fail to fit — within existing conceptual, legal, and policy models. Political influencers, like the billions of people worldwide for whom the internet is inextricable from political participation and civic engagement, rely on social media platforms that offer new ways to understand and engage with the political process, lower the barrier for political organizing, and give greater voice to private individuals. 

At the same time, the evolving role of social media content creators in politics and media grafts greater complexity onto core components of American democracy, some of which are already under strain. Election integrity, free expression, and transparency converge with campaign spending and foreign influence, with little public understanding about how these influencers may be shaping their information environments. 

The report proposes a working definition of political influencers and then explores relevant company policies and the U.S. legal framework. The company policy section covers political advertising, sponsored or branded content, and on-platform monetization. Regarding the US legal framework, the report examines political speech, commercial guidelines, election law and campaign finance, foreign influence, and state-level policy. It also explores constitutional considerations for future policymaking in these areas. The multidisciplinary nature of this report reflects the complexity of influencer-related issues and the need for social media platforms, government, political actors and the intermediaries they work with, and the content creators themselves to take action to protect American democracy and elections in the digital age.

Key findings from the report:

  • Political influencers’ perceived authenticity and credibility with their followers make them particularly effective political messengers, as well as potential vectors for illicit foreign influence and dark money spending that can erode trust in democratic processes.
  • In the same way that transparency can foster accountability in online governance, transparency regarding paid online political speech can empower voters to weigh the credibility and motivations of those seeking to sway their views.
  • The transparency measures put in place by platforms, including paid partnership labels and branded content libraries, do not capture the full extent of compensated political influencer content and create incentives for circumvention. 
  • Influencer intermediaries, such as talent platforms and third-party marketing agencies, are important but sometimes hidden players in the political influencer economy, offering political and issue advocacy groups a convenient way to solicit and purchase political messaging content by online creators.
  • Platform rules are not user friendly, leaving creators to navigate a web of policies related to branded content, disclosures, and political advertising, the complexity of which increases the chance of accidental or intentional violation of platform rules.
  • Political influencers largely fall through the cracks of federal regulation, including oversight of political campaign activities.

Read the full report.

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“Cyclical Misalignment: A History of Campaign Finance Law”

campaign finance

Tony Gaughan has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Ohio State Law Journal). Here is the abstract:

The role of money in politics poses a thorny challenge to democratic government. In a healthy democracy, individual voters should have an equal influence on election outcomes. But robust political discourse depends on candidates having access to effective means of communication. In the absence of a comprehensive public funding system, candidates must turn to private donors to finance their campaigns. Candidates’ reliance on wealthy supporters creates the risk that the rich will exercise disproportionate influence over public policy. Principles of free speech and democratic equality thus sit uneasily together in privately funded campaign finance systems. The United States is the leading case in point. Since the 1700s, Americans have struggled to strike a balance between access to campaign funds on one hand and democratic accountability and responsiveness on the other.

This article examines the history of American campaign finance law prior to the adoption of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. The period from 1619 to 1974 saw the rise and fall of three distinct campaign finance eras characterized by unique laws and practices: the Aristocratic Era (1619-1790s), the Patronage Era (1790s to 1883), and the Nominally Regulated Era (1883 to 1974).

This article contends that the American campaign finance system has proven exceptionally difficult to align with democratic values. The Aristocratic Era, the Patronage Era, and the Nominally Regulated Era reveal the extent of the alignment challenge. On paper at least, each era’s campaign finance system sought to facilitate representational and policy alignment with democratic values by ensuring that elected officials reflected the will of their constituents. But in each case, the reforms failed to achieve the long-term goals of the reformers. Technological change, partisan manipulation, wealthy special interest groups, and evolving popular and elite preferences inevitably led to misalignment. History thus provides a cautionary note for modern campaign finance reformers. It suggests that aligning campaign finance law may be the hardest alignment challenge of all.

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“Donors to Trump’s Ballroom Are Asked Why They Chose to Remain Incognito”

campaign finance

NYT:

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is asking a handful of business interests about their donations to President Trump’s ballroom project, and why they were not disclosed by the White House.

“Many questions remain about the fund-raising for this project, including the amount of each contribution, the agreement reached with each contributor, what promises may have been or may yet be made in exchange for what presumably will be substantial contributions, and why the White House chose to allow donors to remain anonymous,” Mr. Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote in letters to several donors who were revealed in a report by The New York Times over the weekend.

The Trump administration has promised transparency about the funding of the ballroom that is replacing the East Wing of the White House. But donors were given the option of remaining anonymous, and The Times found several whose identities were not disclosed by Mr. Trump’s team last month when a list of more than three dozen donors was released.

Among them were the health care companies Vantive and Extremity Care, which are seeking to shape Medicare reimbursement rates for their products, and the Wall Street powerhouse BlackRock, whose bid to acquire a stake in Panama Canal ports has been supported by Mr. Trump amid opposition from China. An individual donor who was not disclosed by the White House is Jeff Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company who could benefit from a Trump-backed deal to keep the social media app running in the United States….

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“A Fundraiser Convicted of Defrauding ‘Vulnerable’ Victims Is Back — and Making Millions From Republican Campaigns”

campaign finance, chicanery

Dave Levinthal for Notus:

Jack Daly, who was convicted and sent to prison last year after pleading guilty to defrauding thousands of conservative political donors out of money, has emerged from federal custody to quietly re-establish himself as a top Republican Party campaign fundraiser.

A NOTUS investigation found that dozens of federal-level Republican political committees — including the Republican National Committee, numerous congressional committees and campaign operations tied to President Donald Trump — have together spent nearly $18 million on digital fundraising, donor lists and other services from Daly’s latest political consulting firm, Better Mousetrap Digital, according to Virgin Islands corporate filings and Federal Election Commission records.

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“New polling illuminates how the Supreme Court got Citizens United wrong and shows bipartisan momentum for money-in-politics reforms, including proposed Montana ballot measure”

campaign finance

Issue One release:

New polling commissioned by Issue One and conducted this month by YouGov reveals that overwhelming majorities of Americans — and Montanans — broadly believe that large-scale political spending by corporations, dark money groups, and wealthy donors undermines democracy, creates the appearance of corruption, and reduces trust in government.

The results show that voters across the political spectrum, both nationally and in Montana specifically, reject key assumptions made by the U.S. Supreme Court in its controversial 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which unleashed a deluge of big money in elections.

Montanans were polled because a new proposed 2026 ballot measure would eliminate corporate and dark money spending in elections by amending state law governing corporate charters.

Overall, Issue One’s new poll found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans (79%) agreed that large independent expenditures (the technical name for political ads that are not coordinated with a candidate) by wealthy donors and corporations in elections give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. This included 84% of Democrats, 74% of Republicans, and 79% of independents.

Relatedly, more than 3 in 4 Americans (76%) — including 84% of Democrats, 68% of Republicans, and 77% of independents — agreed that “the appearance of wealthy donors or corporations gaining influence over or access to elected officials causes me to lose faith in this democracy.”…

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“Constitutional common sense absent in 6th Circuit’s HB 1 ruling: Mark Brown”

campaign finance, direct democracy

Mark Brown oped in Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Democracy in Ohio suffered a setback when the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati last month refused to block Ohio’s House Bill 1 ban on “foreign nationals” “[m]ak[ing] a contribution … or independent expenditure in support of or opposition to a statewide ballot issue.” Unlike its federal counterpart, Ohio’s ban extends to “issue advocacy” (ballot measures) and criminalizes speech by lawful permanent residents (green card holders) living in Ohio. Further deviating from the longstanding federal prohibition – which allows criminal penalties only when violations are “willful” — Ohio’s new prohibitions criminalize innocent mistakes.

As then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh explained a dozen years ago, Congress chose not to apply the speech restrictions placed on foreign nationals to green card holders because the latter “stand in a different relationship to the American political community …., [and] have a long-term stake in the flourishing of American society.” Kavanaugh also noted that punishing “issue advocacy — that is, speech that does not expressly advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate” (which federal law does not do) — could cross the constitutional “line drawn by the Supreme Court in [FEC v.] Wisconsin Right to Life,” a precursor to its better-known holding in Citizens United v. FEC (extending First Amendment protections from nonprofits to for-profit corporations).

House Bill 1 ignores all of this by both prohibiting green card holders’ speech about ballot issues and then criminalizing domestic nonprofits’ speech about ballot issues when they “us[e] any funds [they] know were received from a foreign national,” including green card holders. Under HB 1’s reach, an editorial printed by a church in a parish bulletin opposing an abortion amendment could be criminal if a green-card parishioner dropped a $1 bill in the Sunday collection plate. The same goes for Ohio’s Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which accepts dues from green card holders and often voices opinions on citizen initiatives.

House Bill 1 threatens just about every charity and membership organization that uses the marketplace of ideas in Ohio with a criminal investigation. Of course, those that fall into the Attorney General’s and Secretary of State’s good graces will have nothing to fear. The rest, however, will effectively be forced either to take complex, expensive and tedious measures to segregate money that is received from lawful permanent residents or simply not speak….

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