If a lab could create the perfect congressional candidate for a particular district at this political moment, it might spit out Alexis Goldstein. She was a federal worker who was fired amid the Trump administration’s push to cripple the administrative state, and she’s running in the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland, a state full of federal workers downsized in the DOGE push. Goldstein, a former program manager in the chief technologist’s office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was fired, in fact, for confronting DOGE functionaries at the CFPB offices last February.
Plus, Goldstein is a highly skilled financial analyst—she worked as a programmer on Wall Street before quitting to join Occupy Wall Street in 2010—at a time when one of the most operatic and unusual financial schemes of the century is playing out in the highly leveraged data center build-out. Practically nobody in the government would have more unique knowledge to understand the dangers. “This is all being built by debt,” she told me. “It’s going to lead to consolidation after the crash and a bailout request, and will there be any conditions on that bailout? That’s what keeps me up at night.”
It all sounds great, until you see the $32 million sitting between her and electoral success.
That money is in the hands of two candidates who are among the richest people in Maryland. None of it is coming from outside, an anomalous scenario in an election cycle defined by special interests injecting millions across the country to influence the primaries. Instead, Rep. April McClain Delaney and former Rep. David Trone have spent the last several months pounding each other with charges of perfidy, criticisms that are largely correct, in an oligarch war over a seat they claim as theirs to purchase fair and square.
Goldstein, armed with a mere $40,000 in receipts for the primary, is simply outgunned. And that’s in some sense the result of who she’s facing: Donors are unlikely to invest in a candidate when her challengers can draw from a limitless stack of cash. “It’s very disheartening,” Goldstein said.
Big money doesn’t always guarantee victory, of course—witness Tom Steyer’s nine-figure outlay getting him third place in California’s gubernatorial race. And another California race could supply a hopeful analogue for Goldstein: In 1998, two billionaires, Al Checchi and Jane Harman, attacked each other so savagely in the Democratic gubernatorial primary that voters revolted and drifted to a third candidate, Gray Davis, who eventually won.
But it’s an uphill climb. Progressive organizations that have had electoral success this year have mounted different strategies to get around the power of big money, including making whoever accepts it toxic, particularly if it is coming from corporate or pro-Israel groups. Even with these tactics, however, in the absence of any credible campaign finance reforms, entry to Congress becomes like a line for a roller coaster, where instead of having to be this tall to get on board you have to raise this many millions, keeping qualified people on the sidelines.
TRONE, THE OWNER OF BIG-BOX SPIRITS FRANCHISE Total Wine, has been buying seats in Congress for close to a decade now. He ran the most expensive self-funded campaign in history in 2016, losing to Jamie Raskin in Maryland’s Eighth District despite spending $12.7 million. He then moved over to the Sixth, where the former millionaire incumbent John Delaney, a bank founder and CEO, had retired to focus on his presidential campaign. Trone threw another $10 million into it and won. After three terms, he grew restless and jumped into the U.S. Senate race in Maryland to replace Ben Cardin. This time he spent $62 million, but suffered a series of missteps, from accidentally using a racial slur during a hearing to maintaining involvement in his Total Wine operation despite claiming to have distanced himself. In the end, he got more disliked the more he campaigned and was smoked by Angela Alsobrooks, who went on to take the Senate seat.
When Trone abandoned the Sixth District, John Delaney’s wife, a media lawyer named April McClain Delaney, decided to run for the seat. She self-funded with almost $4 million and won. But this year, Trone wants back in, and now the two self-funders are facing off against one another.
The amounts involved are absurd. Trone has loaned his campaign $25 million, while also raising a token amount from donors. McClain Delaney has had to step up, loaning herself $7.4 million and taking another $300,000 from dozens of corporate PACs. One report says that she’ll give herself another $5 million before the primary is over. And she’s taken advantage of public money that pays for official communications from members of Congress to spend $380,000 contacting her constituents on their dime.
This all makes the race one of the most expensive House primaries ever, in a seat where the winner is likely to coast in November, even though the district includes Republican territory in Western Maryland and has a purple hue (Kamala Harris won it by only six points in 2024).
On a recent trip to Washington, every political ad I happened to see came from either Trone or McClain Delaney attacking one another. Trone, whose ads say that voters should “re-elect” him even though he’s not currently in Congress, has focused on McClain Delaney’s vote for the Laken Riley Act, which requires detention without bail for noncitizens without criminal convictions. The law has become a key driver of ICE’s detention network. A warehouse near Hagerstown, which is in the district, has been tapped for conversion into a 1,500-bed detention center. Trone has even created a website, McClainDelaney.com, highlighting her votes with Donald Trump and investments in private prisons and border surveillance tools.
McClain Delaney has been endorsed by the entire political establishment in the state, including the full congressional delegation, both U.S. senators, and Gov. Wes Moore. She’s noted that Trone called himself one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. And she has run ads showing him once campaigning with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for a constitutional convention, as well as highlighting past Trone and Total Wine contributions to Republicans.
There’s now a big brouhaha in the district over who Hillary Clinton likes the most, despite the fact that she has not endorsed in the race.
McClain Delaney’s polling shows her in front by double digits, and Trone’s shows him in front slightly. None of them mention Goldstein or the other five candidates in the race.
WHILE THE TRONE–McCLAIN DELANEY RACE might represent everything that’s wrong with campaign finance in America, it’s actually novel in that outside groups are staying out of the district. Elsewhere, PACs representing pro-Israel sentiment, crypto, and the AI industry have air-dropped hundreds of millions of dollars. About $48 million of this money already expended across the country has no known patron, using super PACs that do not have to reveal their donors. Seven super PACs have war chests of over $50 million.
Rival AI PACs, like rival gangs in West Side Story, are taking a stand in a New York City House primary to succeed Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), with $16 million expended thus far both for and against Assemblymember Alex Bores. That doesn’t even account for another $10 million dropped by Michael Bloomberg on behalf of one candidate, Assemblymember Micah Lasher. One candidate on the ballot in Maryland next week, Delegate Adrian Boafo, has benefited from $8.8 million from crypto and pro-Israel PACs in his bid to replace longtime Democratic leader Rep. Steny Hoyer. Republicans have repeatedly tried to meddle in Democratic primaries by boosting who they perceive to be the worst-performing candidate in the general election, with limited success.
Gambling sites FanDuel and DraftKings started their own super PAC, which for now is limited to state legislative races. There’s even a clean-energy PAC trying to back pro-renewable Republicans.
Self-funders have innovated as well. In New York’s Tenth District, Rep. Dan Goldman, heir to the Levi’s clothing fortune, is personally matching each donation to his campaign out of his own pocket.
Yet there’s another trend happening that is at odds with this ocean of spending: Progressive and populist Democrats who are often in the crosshairs of all this advertising spending are winning anyway. Take Randy Villegas in the Central Valley of California, who defeated conservative Democratic Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains despite being outspent. Or state Rep. Chris Rabb, who won a contested open-seat primary in Philadelphia. Or combat surgeon Adam Hamawy, who won a blue seat in New Jersey despite a slew of openly Islamophobic ads. There has been a revival of progressive primary success at the same time that big money has never been spending bigger on politics. How?
Part of it reflects progressives playing the game. PACs for the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats are spending more money than ever before on primaries. And American Priorities, a PAC initiated specifically to counter the Israel lobby’s influence in primaries, has pledged millions of dollars, including $2 million in just three New York City races that will be decided next week. Though this money usually can’t match that of outside PACs dollar for dollar, just getting enough of a message out there can be effective, campaign operatives said.
“We try to organize money on our side, we say the way to power is to organize people and organize money,” said Jasmine Gripper, who runs the Working Families Party in New York. She added that her organization tries to maximize scarce resources. “We see waste in campaigns that happens all the time and we kind of laugh about it. Someone gets a mailer, and the mailer goes to someone who hasn’t lived at that house for years. No one cleaned up the list because they have unlimited amounts of money to spend … Anyone who’s moved, anyone who’s deceased, anyone who hasn’t voted in a long time, they won’t get a mailer from us.”
Another tactic has been rooted in voter education. Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee cited Illinois, where special-interest PAC–fueled candidates had mixed results back in February. “The thing that seemed different there is that it was called out in a high-volume way, to the extent that the money became radioactive,” he said. “Every progressive needs to be primed to call it out from day one, and say, ‘This is crypto.’”
That is especially the case with AIPAC and its affiliates, which are so toxic they have been reduced to feeding money to shell PACs or steering donors to direct funding of candidates, so their name isn’t attached. If anything, this has backfired, as reporting constantly reveals the source of funding. Candidates get hit twice, once for affiliating with AIPAC and again for hiding the donations. AIPAC supporters have been reduced to whining that the left is “trying to use the primary system to exert an outsize and pernicious influence in politics,” which is precisely what AIPAC itself has been doing for the last several cycles.
Goldman, the self-funder who has refused money from AIPAC while taking their endorsement, is being obliterated by former New York City comptroller Brad Lander in polling. Lander has focused heavily on the influence of AIPAC and other outside super PACs.
“The story of the election cycle is that [big money] is not running the table,” Green said.
COULD WE SEE A REPEAT OF THAT in Maryland, despite the two heavyweights sucking up all the oxygen?
It’s unlikely, but here’s how Goldstein is trying it. “You can’t fight fire with fire, you can’t outraise a self-funded billionaire and a mega-millionaire,” she said. “I get sometimes two mailers a day from Trone. People are annoyed at direct mail, annoyed at social media. I think we’re really relying on people wanting an alternative.”
Democratic leaders have suggested to candidates not to antagonize AI companies and attract super PAC ads. But that’s the polar opposite of where voters are. Goldstein is leaning into this by riding the storm of outrage against data center deployments, and articulating the financial chicanery happening behind the scenes to get them built.
There’s one data center already built in Frederick County, with more expected. So residents collected over 21,000 signatures to overturn a county council ruling expanding one complex; whether the referendum will make the November ballot is in the hands of a judge. Goldstein has been appearing at town halls and meetings in the western part of the district, where the issue has really taken off. “People are appreciative, politicians don’t tend to show up there,” she said. “It’s a very bipartisan issue, Republican residents don’t like them either.” Polling bears this out.
Goldstein has fallen back on her financial expertise to attack the data center issue from the perspective of it being a boondoggle. She told me she read the internal documents of CoreWeave, a cloud-based infrastructure company for AI developers that has built data centers. She noticed that Magnetar, a hedge fund that created mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble only to bet against them, was one of CoreWeave’s creditors. “There are 20 default conditions, and if they’re hit the interest rate on the loan jumps by 1 or 2 percent,” Goldstein said. “These are loans from sharks, the same people that brought you the financial crisis.”
There’s a direct line from local communities giving tax breaks for data center deployment and the same beneficiaries funding the destruction of the East Wing of the White House and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Goldstein even connected the ICE warehouse conversion in the district to the AI data centers slated for development: “How do you get caught by ICE? In a surveillance dragnet. From Palantir and AI.”
It would be nice for this perspective to get widely heard, but it’s very hard to get a word in edgewise with the political landscape echoing to the sounds of deafening foghorn blasts paid for by the wealthy. Even the successes in this primary season come from having to beat the oligarchs at their own game by spending super PAC dollars. The campaign finance system defines the boundaries of the debate, and even if you can break it, you must jump in a vat of money. The movement to overturn Citizens United via constitutional amendment and legislate public financing of elections may seem out of reach, but it just might be the only way back from a poisoned system.
“Part of my campaign is shouting as loud as I can, saying this is a bubble and we need to do something about it,” Goldstein said. But if a financial expert yells in a forest, and she can’t afford a microphone sufficient to get anybody to hear it, does it make a sound?
