In missing some avenues of giving, getting it wrong.
If you read The New York Times, you might be under the impression that a small cabal of Republican billionaires is in control of American politics. Well, that impression is very, very wrong.
Yesterday, the Times ran a long piece on how the very wealthy influence American elections. The authors, Steven Rich and Mike Baker, focus on 300 wealthy families and conclude that the vast majority of this money is going to Republicans. While noting that there are billionaires giving money to Democrats, they argue that the wealthy gave “more than $2 billion to Republicans and aligned committees, five times as much as this group gave to their counterparts among the Democrats.”
I am sure that this finding provoked outrage among many Times readers. Not only are the rich dominating our political life, but they are giving money to the wrong people and the wrong party.
Before anyone gets too excited over this provocative article, I would like to point out that it is misleading in two respects. First, it ignores “dark money” that goes through various intermediary organizations. Second, it ignores the role that groups categorized under Internal Revenue Code §§ 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) play in influencing elections. When you broaden the lens to include these two elements, a very different partisan picture emerges.
Rich and Baker focus on Federal Election Committee data concerning contributions to candidates, PACs, and parties. In doing so, they take a very narrow view of how the wealthy shape elections and political outcomes.
One of the fastest-growing and most-important alternatives to direct contributions are so-called “dark-money” vehicles. These entities pool money from many donors and then deploy resources to other organizations that sponsor partisan advertising campaigns and other undertakings focused on electing specific candidates. These pools are not required to disclose their donors, and most provide murky hints, at best, as to the true sources of their largesse.
If our authors had walked down the hall of the Times, they could have learned about “dark money” from Ken Vogel and Theodore Schleifer, who are experts in how the money-and-politics game has changed in recent years. Both have done groundbreaking work on how Arabella, Tides, and other “dark-money” platforms have shaped American elections.
In the 2020 election, Vogel documented how more than $1.5 billion in “dark money” went to groups aligned with Democrats, compared to $900 million that went to Republican-aligned ones. One suspects that the numbers were even higher and more tilted towards Democrats in 2024.
In a recent article by Schleifer, he finds that $613 million was contributed by dark-money organizations to entities helping Kamala Harris in 2024. By contrast, only $275 million from such sources went to help Trump. My guess is that the numbers on Senate and other campaigns would follow a similar pattern.
A second flaw in the Rich and Baker article is that it ignores how a whole host of nonprofits are used to do voter registration, education, and mobilization. In theory, these groups are “nonpartisan” and are prohibited from siding with one party or candidate. In fact, many twist the laws in such a way that these benign charities become part and parcel of real campaigns.
Stacey Abram’s voter-registration group, The New Georgia Project, is one striking example of how these rules have been twisted for partisan purposes. Here is an organization founded and led by a partisan politician that raised millions of dollars between 2014 and 2022. Both of the state’s Democratic Senators credited the work of this and other voter-mobilization groups for their successful campaigns. In the end, the Georgia State Ethics Commission found that New Georgia and an affiliated group violated state law, resulting in a record fine.
Nationally, this story has been repeated over and over again. And, yes, there are conservative and Republican-aligned nonprofits that engage in these activities. But the bulk of the money flowing into these organizations is focused on mobilizing progressive voters on behalf of Democratic candidates.
When you add the money going to nonprofits and dark-money groups with the relatively modest amounts cited in the Times piece, the balance of power shifts very much to the left. George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and a cavalcade of progressive billionaires have dramatically influenced the course of American politics.
The Times may worry about the imbalance in legal political contributions. However, it should really be focused on the other avenues that the mega-wealthy use to steer elections. As its own reporters have documented, that is where the real action is in political giving.
