This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
By the time this year’s primary season was winding down, corporations had already shelled out more than half a billion dollars in support of congressional candidates, exceeding the previous record of $461 million set during the 2024 election cycle. The flood of campaign contributions was driven in large part by the artificial intelligence, crypto, and online gambling industries. And independent expenditures—not to the candidates but on (or against) their behalf—also surged to record levels this year.
According to OpenSecrets, outside groups spent more than $790 million on independent expenditures over the eight months ending August 10, up from about $477 million during the same period in the 2024 election cycle.
“That’s just a fraction of what we will end up with when we get to November,” Brendan Galvin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, told the Prospect.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) defines independent expenditures as spending on communications, such as television or social media ads, that expressly advocate for the election or defeat of a particular candidate. Outside groups that engage in this spending include political action committees (PACs) and super PACs. As a practical matter, PACs can make direct campaign contributions and independent expenditures within applicable limits. Super PACs, which unlike PACs cannot contribute directly to campaigns, exist to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money independently of a candidate. Federal election law also prohibits coordination between super PACs and any candidate, their campaign, or political party, but cooperation remains common.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United held that corporations have the right to spend their own money to advocate for or against candidates because “independent” spending is protected under the First Amendment. It was this ruling, as well as subsequent court decisions, that opened the floodgates of dark money into our elections. Corporations, billionaires, and otherwise moneyed interests have since been able to spend as much as they want to influence voters without having to disclose it because the justices relied on the assumption that existing transparency rules would be enough to preserve voters’ right to know.
Virtually every state can curtail the corporate domination of politics—without amending the Constitution.
That assumption aged like milk.
“What we’ve seen since then,” Galvin said, “is a massive increase in money being spent in elections that is not transparent at all.”
Much like PACs, super PACs must also report their donors to the FEC. But when they receive contributions from a nonprofit, the often unilluminating name of that nonprofit is all that is disclosed. Its own sources of funding stay hidden, as nonprofits themselves are not required to disclose their donors.
Democratic members of Congress reintroduced the DISCLOSE Act earlier this year in a bid to “shut the dark money floodgates,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has been leading the charge alongside Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and two of their colleagues. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first introduced the DISCLOSE Act in 2010 following the Citizens United decision. Whitehouse has reintroduced the legislation in every subsequent congressional session. While hearings are on the horizon, the bill has yet to surmount Republican opposition in Congress.
Fortunately, a separate track has emerged to eradicate the scourge of dark money in our elections.
Corporations derive their power from the states where they are chartered. For that reason, virtually every state can curtail the corporate domination of politics. Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the mastermind behind the “Corporate Power Reset,” a legal framework for states to leverage their existing authority to end the era of corporate and dark money in politics—all without amending the Constitution, or waiting around for the Supreme Court to reverse its decision in Citizens United. This framework, which is rooted in 200 years of corporation law, was the focus of a paper Moore authored in September 2025.
States possess what is known as the reserved powers clause, which “has been sitting around since 1819,” Moore told the Prospect. He was referring to Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Dartmouth v. Woodward. As Marshall wrote at the time, a corporation “is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence.” In other words, the right of corporations to exist at all is given to them by the states in which they are chartered.
“If business corporations and nonprofit corporations are destroying our democracy through a bunch of unregulated, undisclosed spending, we have the authority … to haul them back in, chop that power off, and send them back out,” said Moore.
In addition to reserved powers, the other two pieces of this framework are what give it its teeth: Any change made to corporation law applies to both existing corporations and new ones, and no out-of-state corporation can exercise power that an in-state corporation cannot exercise. “The three of those working together,” Moore said, “that’s the key.” Over the past two years, at least 14 states have introduced legislation seeking to invoke their power to curtail corporate political influence through their campaign spending, with Hawaii enacting its own law in May, and Montana’s secretary of state certifying in August a statutory ballot initiative that will come before state voters in November’s midterm elections. Organizers in Montana collected more than 50,000 signatures to get I-194, also known as the Montana Plan, on the ballot.
“I’d expect at least 30 states to have this in front of their legislatures next January,” Moore told the Prospect. “It is moving.”
THE MONTANA PLAN BEGAN WITH A CONVERSATION between Moore and Jeff Mangan on a Friday evening in the fall of 2024.
“Tom reached out and said he had this white paper that he’d been working on that might be able to address some of the issues that we have with Citizens United,” Mangan said in an interview. “We both are always looking for a way to combat dark money in elections, and fix what we believe is a broken system.”
He reached out to Moore immediately after reading the white paper.
“I just called him up that night and said, ‘We’re doing this in Montana; I’m starting tomorrow,’” Mangan told the Prospect. “I started laying the groundwork that next day.”
When they first met, Mangan was early into his six-year term as Montana’s 12th commissioner of political practices. It was 2017. At the time, Moore served as counsel and chief of staff for FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. “I met Ellen at a conference, and then subsequently met Tom,” said Mangan. The three of them have “remained friends” ever since.
In April 2025, Mangan formally established the Transparent Election Initiative (TEI), a 501(c)(4) organization focused on passing the Montana Plan and supporting similar state-based reform efforts around the country. TEI has spent the past two years engaging people around the state to support the Montana Plan.
“I started traveling across the state of Montana … asking people to come talk to me about campaign finance,” he said. “I did a little presentation on Montana’s history with corruption and campaign finance, and why this state would be a perfect state to launch a nationwide effort to get this done.”
As the plan gained traction, interest in it expanded beyond the state’s own borders.
In Hawaii, state Sen. Karl Rhoads (D) proposed a bill seeking to curtail undisclosed political spending by corporations after reading about Montana’s efforts on Prospect co-founder Robert Reich’s Substack. “It clicked with everything that I’ve been thinking about for years,” Rhoads said at Indivisible Hawaii’s post–legislative session webinar in May.
“Some folks in the activist community reached out to me to see if I could get a draft together that would slip into Hawaii’s laws, and I got that to them,” Moore told the Prospect. “Didn’t hear anything for a couple months, and then all of a sudden, we found that there [were] something like six bills on the House and Senate side, all introduced, all pretty much the same.”
In addition to Rhoads’s bill and four others, another had been introduced by state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole (D), who told the Prospect he also learned about the framework on Reich’s Substack. According to Moore, Keohokalole’s bill was good, but Rhoads’s was “a little bit better.” Keohokalole then put his own bill aside and helped steer Rhoads’s bill, SB 2471, through the Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee, which Keohokalole chairs.
“It was one of these things where it’s not that everybody loved it, but nobody wanted to be the one to kill it, and everybody kind of hoped the next guy would kill it,” Moore said. “At a certain point, I was talking to Sen. Keohokalole about it, and he said, ‘This thing has become a runaway freight train, and no one wants to step in front of it—not even the governor,’ and he was saying it admiringly.”
Keohokalole told the Prospect that much of the force pushing that train forward came from “the strength of the community support” for SB 2471. “It is part of why we structured the bill the way we did.”
Activists and organizers with Indivisible Hawaii consistently pushed Hawaii legislators to advance the bill. “By the end of the legislative session,” said Sam Guckenheimer, lead organizer at Indivisible Hawaii’s Kona chapter, “we had people calling their state representatives and senators from practically every district in the state.”
That approach was especially critical when the bill was headed to the conference committee. In Hawaii, bills can die in conference if leadership fails to assign conferees. Indivisible Hawaii activated members with this in mind. “By getting members to call the offices of the right people at the right time, we got the mindshare to get the conferees assigned,” Guckenheimer told the Prospect.
The bill’s opponents were working the legislature, too, led by the Pacific Resource Partnership (PRP), a nonprofit organization representing Hawaii’s largest construction union and some 250 contractors around the state. The PRP, which Guckenheimer called “the main user of dark money here,” was “sowing doubt on this,” arguing the measure would hamper the voices of its members.
“In the end,” Guckenheimer said, “the conference committee submitted the final version of the bill and amendments five minutes before conference committee cutoffs, and the last amendment was a floor vote on the last possible day in the session … and that morning, the sponsors were not sure it was going to pass.”
The last amendment extended the date the measure would take effect to July 1, 2027, giving legislators more time in the forthcoming legislative session to “provide an opportunity for us to get it right and to make changes before the implementation of the measure,” Keohokalole told the Prospect.
SB 2471 passed the House and Senate by a combined two-chamber total of 74-1. Following demonstrations in support of the measure and outreach by Indivisible Hawaii, Gov. Josh Green (D) signed it into law as Act 11.
THE NEW LAW QUICKLY BECAME THE TARGET of the libertarian Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, which filed a federal lawsuit in June to strike it down. Though the legal theory underpinning Act 11 and the Montana Plan might be ironclad, Moore anticipates that any legal challenges will eventually work their way up to the Supreme Court. If and when they do, he predicted, the justices would have to “shatter foundational state corporation law in a way that can be very destabilizing and shatter the federalism that the Roberts Court has been developing for the last 20 years.”
“I’m never ever going to convince the Supreme Court that they’re going to enjoy eating the spider,” Moore, opting for vivid imagery, told the Prospect, “but I will convince them to eat the spider if the alternative is drinking a glass of battery acid.”
And by the time this case would reach the Supremes, there may be more than two state laws with which the justices would have to grapple. “The path that we should be taking in fighting Citizens United is to get lots of states picking this up so that we create an unmistakable groundswell, and then force federal action on this,” Guckenheimer said. Should the Court’s conservatives strike down such state laws, the mobilizations around those laws could prompt federal action, including constitutional action, to strike down Citizens United.
