This article appears in the December 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
After Joe Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris became the presumptive presidential nominee back in July, a brief period of jubilance erupted, reaching its zenith at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everyone was riding high and the base was thoroughly activated, unburdened by the weight of their sunsetting president. “Brat” flags abounded, even among the anarchists protesting the convention because of the war in Gaza. The coconut-pill memes that took over the internet had reached the masses.
The last thing anyone wanted to talk about was the dirty business of money in politics. Perhaps foolishly on my part, that was what I had come to discuss. Because in the background of this convention’s rosy picture were a few titanic forces reshaping American politics.
Everywhere you turned in Chicago, mega-donors and top lobbyists fraternized among civilians at forums during the daytime and soirees at night, all prominently sponsored by giant corporations. On the convention stage, former bank CEOs and scam for-profit college board members got speaking slots, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, an “actual billionaire” in his words, boasted about his personal fortune relative to Donald Trump’s.
A favorite giveaway at the convention was a phone charger stamped with the phrase “I stood with crypto at the DNC.” The cryptocurrency industry, which was all over the event schedule, emerged as one of the largest outside special interests in the 2024 elections, with a roughly $245 million war chest. Democrats had grown accustomed to the tech industry being an ally. But this crop of Silicon Valley oligarchs felt betrayed by the Biden administration’s regulatory crackdown on digital assets. Through a PAC called Fairshake, they vowed to carry out vengeance on any Democratic candidate who didn’t bend the knee, and reward those who pledged subservience.
Another active presence at the DNC was the various pro-Israel interest groups. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee amassed a $100 million budget used almost exclusively in primaries, and went about systematically purging any candidate who didn’t sufficiently echo their unflinching support for Israel amid the butchering in Gaza.
These twin pillars dramatically shook up Democratic politics, threatening not just the progressive wing but the Senate majority. Earlier that summer, Fairshake had put out notice on both Sens. Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, promising to nuke their re-election hopes.
I wanted to know whether the looming tsunami of cash might re-energize the long-sought goal of imposing new campaign finance restrictions after the election, if Democrats regained power in Washington. For the most part, I received blank stares. “We need every tool in the arsenal to defeat MAGA Republicans,” was the consensus response.
A projected $16 billion was pumped across federal elections this year; 2012 saw just $7 billion.
This encapsulates a specific feature of Democratic politics in the Trump era: Defeating Trump supersedes all other goals, even the ones fueling his rise, such as a prevailing sense of deep corruption and rot in Washington.
Nobody working on the campaign side wants to engage in what was described to me as “unilateral disarmament.” And the open secret is that Democrats have been highly effective in this money race, relative to their GOP opponents. In 2020, for example, Democrats took in more than twice as much untraceable dark money as Republicans—one of the illicit channels of campaign finance that Democrats say they want to regulate.
The Democratic fundraising advantage creates friction with the strategists and staffers on the political side in Washington, who see the broad popularity of getting money out of politics and want to prioritize campaign finance reform, but are stymied by the lure of big money. “If you’re party leadership and you keep winning the game, then you don’t want to stop playing,” a staffer for the Congressional Progressive Caucus explained to me.
But that only holds true if Democrats keep winning elections. In the most expensive campaign in political history, Democrats outperformed their opponents on most spending metrics in 2024, yet still lost the presidency and the Senate. These dual outcomes are not unrelated: The extent to which Democrats have catered to the wishes of the donor class to the detriment of their own electoral chances is exactly the problem the party now has to reckon with. It starts with the plumbing of how money flows into elections.
“WE’RE LIVING NOW IN THE HELLSCAPE created by Citizens United,” said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 2010, which declared that political spending is protected speech that cannot be impeded by the federal government. Cohen, a DNC member and board member of Our Revolution, has spent decades trying to fix the corruption inherent in campaign spending rules.
One immediate consequence of the ruling, and a harbinger of how corporate America would use the new rules to their advantage, was the GOP’s complete reversal from a moderate stance on climate change, as exhibited during the 2007 presidential primaries. Geysers of oil and gas cash started pouring into American politics, and Republicans complied. It would prove to be a pattern, in both parties.
A projected $16 billion was pumped across federal elections this year; the first presidential campaign after the Citizens United decision, in 2012, saw just $7 billion, which at the time set a record. So spending has more than doubled in 12 years.
Campaigns have scaled up their fundraising operations over the past decade, including through platforms like ActBlue that allow for gathering more small-dollar donations. Those individual contributions are limited to $6,600 ($3,300 per primary and $3,300 per general election). Registered political action committees (PACs) can donate directly to candidates, but those contributions are limited to $5,000.
None of that accounts for most of the exponential growth in campaign spending. Super PACs, developed with the blessing of Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions, have no limits on contribution size, making them much more convenient venues for mega-donors. A few varieties of super PACs have sprung up: PACs working on behalf of a specific campaign or candidate to bring in larger volumes of cash, PACs organized at the behest of party leadership to boost their most promising candidates, and PACs organized on behalf of special interests to advance a specific corporate or political agenda for multiple candidates.
This two-track campaign finance system—limited donations to candidate accounts and unlimited donations to super PACs—now defines all modern political campaigns. But the ways in which the two parties have harnessed this new landscape are not entirely congruent.
YOMIURI SHIMBUN/AP PHOTO
The Harris campaign had so much available cash, it spent $450,000 per day for an ad on the Las Vegas Sphere.
Kamala Harris’s campaign raised an astounding $1.2 billion during her four-month sprint to the finish line. Her campaign drew on big donors from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. But she wasn’t just raking in donations from the wealthy. Over the course of her campaign, she expanded her small-dollar donor base, too, which Democrats have continued to do for multiple election cycles now.
The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign nearly 3-to-1, and still got swept across the seven battleground states. Her campaign was so flush with cash that it gave $25 million to down-ballot races through the party’s various committees, and splurged on an advertisement on the Las Vegas Sphere that cost $450,000 per day. Based on filings, the campaign not only spent everything but are reportedly paying off $20 million in debt.
Republican campaigns, on the other hand, have fallen behind in their fundraising totals for individual candidates, in part because they haven’t been able to draw on as deep a well of donors. To make up the fundraising gap, Republicans lean heavily on super PACs, allowing them to absorb giant checks from a handful of uber-wealthy families who finance the bulk of their campaigns. “Republicans’ fundraising strategy is all about finding ways to get more money out of fewer people,” said Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United.
More than 1 in 6 dollars used by presidential candidates and associated PACs this year were contributed by a billionaire, according to the Financial Times. One hundred and fifty billionaire families broke spending records by contributing $1.9 billion to a multitude of PACs this cycle. With last-minute spending, that will likely reach over $2 billion. Of that total, just over 70 percent went to Republican candidates and right-wing PACs, per data compiled by Americans for Tax Fairness.
This dynamic is reflected in the list of mega-donor rainmakers this election. Of the top ten largest campaign contributors, only two gave to Democrats: Michael Bloomberg and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, each netting less than $50 million. Put together, those two Democratic bundlers don’t even reach the individual contributions for several of the GOP’s top donors. The largest donor this election was Timothy Mellon ($197 million), the highly secretive heir to the Mellon railroad fortune.
This top-heavy donor base explains why Republicans defend the campaign finance status quo and block even modest restrictions on outside spending. But while Republicans are more dependent on super PACs, it’s not the whole story.
CITIZENS UNITED OPENED UP ANOTHER SINKHOLE in campaign finance: dark money, now one of the fastest-growing areas for moving cash around in election years. While most contributions even to super PACs have to be filed with the Federal Election Commission, political fundraising professionals discovered a work-around. Registered nonprofit entities known as 501(c)(4) organizations, based on a particular section of the tax code, don’t have to disclose their donors and then can transfer funds to a super PAC without any way to track the money trail. There are some light restrictions on what (c)(4)s can spend on directly, but there’s very little oversight.
In the 2024 cycle, dark-money operations will reach over a billion dollars in total, a major share of overall spending. Dark money and so-called “gray money,” which is money fed into super PACs from dark-money entities, will make up about half of the $4.5 billion in outside spending on all federal elections this year.
Most super PACs now have their own affiliated dark-money receptacle to offer to their donors who may prefer more secrecy about their political dealings. “You have all these different P.O. boxes, but they’re all run by the same people and the money is ultimately going through the same bank accounts,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center.
In the 2020 cycle, Democrats won the dark-money game by a long shot and are expected to outpace Republicans this year as well. More than $500 million went to Democrats in 2020, compared with $200 million to Republicans.
A lot of the dark money Democrats received this year was funneled through the super PAC Future Forward, bankrolled by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and other Wall Street and Silicon Valley titans.
Future Forward was the largest single outside spending PAC in the entire election with $700 million raised, and it effectively functioned as an arm of the national Democratic Party. Of that total, $136 million came in the form of dark money from Future Forward’s affiliated (c)(4) Future Forward USA.
Future Forward didn’t just raise and distribute money. The PAC essentially set strategy for the Harris campaign to an unprecedented degree. A consulting firm housed inside the PAC called Blue Rose Research was given “agenda-setting power” to conduct detailed message testing and polling that defined the campaign’s approach.
Democrats’ cash advantage in campaign fundraising at the presidential level was replicated in House and Senate races, too. Republicans were only able to stay competitive on television thanks to super PAC spending by party-affiliated PACs and outside spenders.
Some Democratic members see any path to progress as unpassable without getting money out of politics first.
Take, for example, Elon Musk’s America PAC, a top funder in 18 House swing districts, helping to bridge a $60 million funding gap between the official Republican and Democratic campaign arms. Republicans didn’t win all of those races, but they had a much better chance with Musk’s air support.
In the Senate races, Montana became one of the most expensive races this cycle, notching a whopping $300 million. Jon Tester’s campaign spent over $79 million, while Republican challenger Tim Sheehy’s campaign spent nearly $22 million. But Sheehy received assistance from four separate GOP-aligned PACs, three of which dropped $20 million in spending. Tester had his own help from independent expenditures, which slightly undermatched the GOP spending. Still, it couldn’t save Tester in the end.
In Ohio, a similar dynamic played out between Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno. Despite being out-fundraised, Moreno received a major boost from various special-interest outfits, including an aggressive money dump from crypto umbrella PAC Fairshake. In the end, Fairshake spent $40 million on ads to exact their revenge on Brown for his perceived hawkishness on crypto enforcement. Moreno won by four points.
Fairshake proved to be perhaps the biggest winner of the elections. Other than Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA), they won every one of the 48 races they spent on. Crypto donors made up almost half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle. The majority of that mountain of cash went to Republicans, including last-minute support for candidates like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“Tonight the crypto voter has spoken decisively—across party lines and in key races across the country,” gushed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose company was responsible for much of Fairshake’s funding, in a post-election statement. But there’s no way to divine the crypto voter’s preferences, if they exist; none of Fairshake’s ads even mentioned crypto.
The PAC staked its claim early in this election year, when it used $10 million to knock Katie Porter (D-CA) out of the California Senate primary in favor of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). Fairshake also helped knock off progressive Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), spending $3.4 million on their primaries in all. That didn’t come close to AIPAC’s $14 million spent against Bowman, but it certainly contributed to the defeat, and showed progressives that both interest-group PACs will team up against them over any perceived slight.
Fairshake’s 48 victories may actually understate the overall impact crypto had on the 2024 elections. Crypto’s interventions in the primaries instilled the fear of God in other Democratic candidates, so much so that Fairshake’s presence was felt even in races where they never ended up getting involved. Campaigns put up pro-crypto language on their websites just to avoid a massive money dump from these outside independent expenditures.
After Fairshake indicated that it would threaten Brown and Tester (the latter threat was ultimately empty), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promised at a “Crypto4Harris” event that “Crypto is here to stay no matter what … we all believe in the future of crypto.” After that, Fairshake returned the favor by intervening to spend $10 million on behalf of Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. Both won close Senate races in states Trump carried.
Fairshake’s influence across elections is unprecedented in American politics, according to campaign finance analysts. And the PAC isn’t going anywhere, having banked $78 million for the 2026 midterms while pledging to continue punishing any candidate who steps out of line. The crypto industry will almost certainly be rewarded with deregulatory legislation in the next Congress.
AS FAIRSHAKE HARNESSES THE POST–CITIZENS UNITED world to its fullest, other independent expenditures this cycle pioneered novel tactics to tear down even the few remaining restrictions in place on their spending.
The one key restriction, in theory, on super PACs is that they can’t coordinate with campaigns directly. For several election cycles now, that firewall has been slowly disintegrating. One way to get around the rule is through “red boxes.” The way it works is that campaigns put up a media tab on their websites with explicit messaging guidance, information that super PACs can then use to target expenditures. These boxes signal what points to include in paid advertising, keeping the super PAC aligned with the candidate without directly communicating with them.
Red boxes have become common across the board. But campaigns are still finding novel ways to move into new territory for candidate coordination. A relatively new phenomenon that emerged this election cycle was super PACs running canvassing operations directly on behalf of their preferred candidate.
Forerunners to this arrangement can be found in earlier election cycles. In the 2004 presidential election, a George Soros–funded PAC ran get-out-the-vote operations in swing states for John Kerry. But the PAC was ultimately found in violation of campaign finance rules because of how it had sourced funding for these types of retail politics activities. Fast-forward 20 years later, and the same practice has been legalized.
The Trump campaign hardly ran a ground game at all this election, but in states like Pennsylvania, his team effectively outsourced field work to GOP mega-donor Elon Musk’s America PAC to hire door-knockers and run canvassing.
The reason this raises red flags for campaign finance law is that canvassing is a targeted type of voter outreach that requires detailed precinct-level data, voter rolls, party affiliation, neighborhood layouts, and some underlying strategy. For there to be no coordination on these practices between the independent expenditure and the campaign would be highly dubious, because it risks redundancy in voter outreach.
Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
The crypto industry dominated the elections; spending $40 million to defeat Sherrod Brown was a signature win.
But the practice was effectively legalized by a ruling the Federal Election Commission handed down earlier this year. The case was brought by a Democratic-aligned super PAC called Texas Majority, which sought to employ canvassers. In typical Democratic fashion, the group sought FEC approval beforehand, whereas Republicans would ask for forgiveness later. When the FEC gave their blessing, Musk then picked up on the ruling and used it to his own advantage.
In the case of the Trump arrangement with Musk in Pennsylvania, some media reports suggested that his operations were a disaster, with widespread dysfunction because of a lack of professional experience. But Trump did after all win the state, and Musk’s resources relieved the Trump campaign from having to spend on those operations.
A lower-profile development this year was in the extensive use of joint fundraising committees. These are spending vehicles operated on behalf of multiple different candidates of the same party to pool fundraising resources. The main benefit is that the joint fundraising committee can solicit much larger donations than individual campaigns. Joint fundraising committees used to have stricter aggregate caps on the donation amounts they could receive, but those caps were all but rolled back after a 2014 FEC ruling.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) used these joint committees to their advantage to make up for their campaign’s shortfalls. They devised a strategy of using the committee to pay for candidate advertising but framed it as a fundraising solicitation to bypass certain content restrictions for these types of ads.
Joint committees also allowed the NRSC to stretch their ad dollars. One of the biggest advantages for candidate campaign spending is the law that entitles them to lower ad rates. Sometimes ads bought by super PACs are as much as 20 times more expensive than candidate ads. But these hybrid committee ads could qualify for the discounted rate.
Democrats tried to challenge this use of a joint fundraising committee in the Wisconsin Senate race, but the FEC deadlocked at 3-3. This was something of a preordained result: The Federal Election Commission has only six members, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. If a party wants to do something in campaign finance, it’s hard to get the Commission to tell them no.
AS REMAINING FIREWALLS COME CRASHING DOWN and the campaign finance system looks as broken as ever, some Democratic members want to reignite a galvanizing fight from the 2010s that was a key plank of Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs. In their view, any path to progress will be unpassable without getting money out of politics first.
“I think there is genuine desire [on the Democratic side] to try to fix the system, because letting dark money and outside spending influence the system really minimizes the voice of actual American voters and maximizes the voice of corporations,” said a Senate staffer. The current setup of effectively unlimited campaign cash also forces members to start fundraising again almost as soon as they win office, rather than prioritizing legislation.
Yet without control of Congress or the presidency, and with Republican hostility to campaign finance restrictions, Democrats have no clear path at the moment to push for federal legislation. This is in a sense an entirely predictable result. Democrats rode high on dark money and fundraising advantages for years, only for Republicans to innovate and skirt the remaining FEC restrictions, while bringing mega-donors off the sidelines. The rules aren’t working for Democrats anymore, and now they have no way to change them, as big money gets ever more powerful.
That doesn’t mean all is lost. Internally, the party can get its own house in order, and revamp its image in the eyes of the electorate, without unilateral disarmament.
The Citizens United decision said that the federal government can’t interfere with how outside entities decide to use their money in elections. In most states though, primaries are organized and controlled by state party chapters, which have discretion to set different rules for how candidates qualify to win the nomination before going on to the general election. Given how much money is spent on primaries now, they’re an important locus for reform.
State parties could amend their charters to impose various rules on how candidates finance campaigns. In the most ambitious case, they could ban candidates competing in primaries for the nomination from accepting money from corporate registered PACs or dark-money funds.
This novel idea is being tested by Larry Cohen. “We need to get more creative and experimental with the levers of power we have control over, and I see this as the best way forward,” he said. Cohen was instrumental in the fight at the DNC to get rid of the superdelegate system. He recently stumped for a proposal at the DNC to study restrictions on campaign spending that was never taken up by the Rules and Bylaws Committee.
For the next four years out of power, Democrats will have to push new boundaries to take on money in politics. There’s a lot of soul-searching that will take place over the next several months. One option for Democrats is returning to their long-forgotten progressive roots, which along with trust-busting and other economic reforms included a strong anti-corruption plank.
