“Plutocratic Democracy, Elon Musk, and the Limits of Campaign Finance Reform”

campaign finance, Plutocrats United

Guy Charles and Frances Peale have posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming in  Campaign Finance and the First Amendment, Lee C. Bollinger & Geoffrey R. Stone, Eds., 2025). Here is the abstract:

Politicians appear to be increasingly dependent upon a group of ultra-wealthy elites who not only fund their campaigns but are critical for the functioning of public governance. These ultrawealthy individuals provide the indispensable infrastructure, expertise, and communication that are critical to modern electoral politics. These ultra-wealthy individuals want more than influence, seeking instead to govern even though the voters do not elect them. This chapter describes this process and argues that the campaign finance literature, which is mired in a debate about corruption and equality, is not well-positioned to address this contemporary challenge to representative democracy. The piece refers to this challenge as “plutocratic democracy,” and uses Elon Musk as a case study.

This is an important piece, and is very much in line with my own draft, Faux Campaign Finance Regulation and the Pathway to American Oligarchy (conference paper dated Apr. 24, 2025, draft available, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5229707).

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“District Populations and Partisan Bias”

redistricting

Barry Burden and Veronica Judson have written this article for Legislative Studies Quarterly. Here is the abstract:

We investigate whether the differing population sizes of legislative districts affect the ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering. We conjecture that larger populations facilitate partisan gerrymandering by providing mapmakers with more “raw material” to manipulate, and this might make such districts less compact. Evidence based on measures of partisan bias, district population, and compactness suggests that more populous districts encourage partisan distortion and do so partly through violations of compactness. Regression analysis of lower and upper chamber state legislative maps shows that more populous districts lead to more partisan bias in maps even after accounting for other aspects of districts and Voting Rights Act requirements that affect how states draw district lines.

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“How the Electoral College Could Tilt Further From Democrats”

electoral college

NYT:

The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.

That is the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold. After every decennial census, like the one coming up in 2030, congressional seats are reallocated among the states based on population shifts. Those seats in turn affect how big a prize each state is within the Electoral College — or how a candidate actually wins the presidency.

In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats….

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“How California bluffed its way into a redistricting war with Trump”

redistricting

Politico:

When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?

Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so.

“It seemed to me worth a bluff,” Lofgren said. “If the Texans and Trump thought they’d go through all of this and they’d end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”

“But they didn’t stop,” she added. “They just doubled down.”

So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency.

“It got very real, very fast,” recounted Newsom, whose provocative podcast appearances and social media posturing lit the fuse for this slapdash effort — and positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party in advance of his likely 2028 White House run.

Texas Republicans approved a gerrymandered map early Saturday morning.

POLITICO spoke with nearly 50 people involved with the California effort, including lawmakers, political operatives, staffers and redistricting wonks. Many were granted anonymity to share details of private deliberations of the tightly-guarded process, which spanned multiple states and levels of government. Together, they paint a picture of a showdown propelled not by painstaking deliberations but by its own self-generating momentum and the opportunity for a rudderless Democratic party to remake itself as a political street brawler….

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