Just a couple of hours before the 2025-2026 session of the California legislature was to conclude, “the entire corporate lobbyist corps was in the rotunda,” says Chris Ward, a Democratic assemblymember from San Diego who had authored the bill against which they were lobbying. The corps, Ward recalls, included lobbyists from “McDonald’s, Target, Walmart, Amazon—30 to 40 lobbyists causing confusion, planting seeds of doubt.”
Ward’s bill, which would have curtailed retailers’ surveillance pricing—that is, customizing a product’s price to the individual consumer’s online interests, records, and spending capacity—had already passed in both the Senate and the Assembly, where it had originated. Earlier in the day, the Senate had finally passed it, but in somewhat amended fashion, requiring the Assembly to vote on it yet again.
When the Assembly had originally passed the bill, 42 (all of them Democrats) out of the body’s 80 members had voted for it. But now Ward was struggling to keep the support of 41 of them. He couldn’t: Seven of its original supporters now heeded the lobbyists’ call and hesitated to back it again, in full knowledge that their hesitation meant the bill would not come to a vote before the impending final gavel would bring the year’s session to an end. With that, the bill died, despite polling showing mass public discontent with the practice of surveillance pricing.
California’s 99 largest corporate and right-wing campaign contributors have donated $83.9 million to the Democrats currently in state office.
It didn’t die for lack of Democrats, who number 60 in the Assembly and 30 in the 40-member state Senate—which is to say, they hold a three-quarters supermajority in each house. Democratic dominance in the state has been a constant for decades. But for a two-year blip in 1995-1996, the Democrats have controlled the Assembly since 1971, and the Senate (with no blips) since 1975. For the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, the Republicans had at least enough votes to block the two-thirds supermajority required to override a governor’s veto. But for the past 20 or so years, they haven’t even had that.
Please note, however, that when Ward’s bill initially passed both Assembly and Senate, it did so not with the unified support of the Democratic caucuses, but with the barest of majorities. That seven of Ward’s bare majority in the Assembly withheld their support at the crucial moment, then, didn’t signal a total departure from Democratic legislators’ behavior patterns. Those seven proved to be as susceptible to corporate lobbyists’ blandishments as their Democratic colleagues who hadn’t voted for the bill in the first place.
What the past 15 or so years of California history makes clear is that when one party has a lock on lawmaking and rulemaking, and when that lock coincides with a period of virtual total deregulation of campaign spending from the wealthy and corporations, the wealthy and corporations will do their damnedest to buy the party with the lock.
California Republicans used to collect a fair quantity of corporate donations to obstruct what they could—as noted above, GOP legislators had until about 2010 just enough strength to at least block veto overrides. Today, they don’t. It should come as no surprise, then, that the state’s 99 largest corporate and right-wing campaign contributors have donated $83.9 million to the Democrats currently in state office, and just $23.1 million to their Republican counterparts. If you can’t beat them, buy them.
These numbers come from a remarkable analytic database that is going live today: the California Oligarch Index. From 2005 through 2024, the database documents the campaign and lobbying spending of the 99 biggest corporate and individual right-wing donors to state-level political candidates and causes, which came to a cool $5.8 billion. This total exceeded the donations by the bottom 99.9 percent of California residents, a category that also includes small businesses, unions, and nonprofit groups. The index not only sorts out the donations by industry (oil and gas, real estate, pharmaceutical, insurance, etc.), but also by the particular causes to which each of the 99 contributed.
Even more comprehensively, it also does the same for local elections and lobbying efforts during this two-decade period in California’s 20 largest counties and cities—documenting the contributions from the 25 largest corporate and individual donors in each of those counties and cities, and calculating the share of total donations that those of the 25 constituted. Two further sets then break down the contributions to state elected officials, and the particular causes to which those donations were made.
These databases are the handiwork of Colorado-based civil rights attorney Jim Freeman and his team of researchers. Freeman has compiled such indices of other states as well, and shared them with the progressive and community-based organizations with which he works. The California index, though, is the first that’s gone public. Despite this massive feat of data aggregation and sorting, Freeman immediately notes that it’s still just part of the picture, as there’s no real way to track who are the donors to dark-money super PACs. He also adds that donors with a focus on legislation affecting their own industry also give to omnibus business groups like the state and local chambers of commerce, so that an oil company, for instance, ends up supporting the campaigns of drug companies to keep their prices high.
The numbers in these databases explain why some of California’s Democratic legislators effectively function as the moderate Republicans of yore on a range of low-profile economic issues. The past couple of decades of unbroken one-party rule have seen one Democratic legislator resign mid-term to go to work for Chevron (the largest corporate donor over the 20-year period in the Oligarch index), while another resigned to go to work for PhRMA. Such Democrats sometimes encounter primary opposition from candidates backed by unions and progressive groups; enough of them survive such challenges to keep corporate lobbyists fully employed. Given the eclipse of California Republicans, and so long as campaign finance remains the Wild West, there will be legislative Democrats working, whether directly or not, for the Chevrons, the PhRMAs, and their well-heeled ilk.
