Could $45 million a month be sufficient to help push a controversial presidential candidate back into the White House?
Musk has since denied relates of the planned donations, writing on X earlier this month that he has “not pledged anything to anyone!” He did acknowledge that he sired “a PAC that is focused on supporting candidates who favor a meritocracy and personal freedom.”
Even if eye-popping donations aren’t taking place, the fact that it would even be possible raised renewed concerns over big money’s role in US elections — on both sides of the civic spectrum.
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Democracy for sale
Daniel Weiner, the director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, phrased mega donations from billionaires in recent election cycles underscore the pressing need for campaign finance rectification.
“There have been extreme mega-donors in past election cycles as well, but it’s definitely supercharged this ease,” Weiner told Business Insider. “There are also Democratic super PACs and Democratic mega-donors, and those suppliers have been very involved recently.”
The campaign financing “arms race” was ignited in 2008 when then-presidential applicant Barack Obama declined to use the federal public financing system, which provides public money but with expense limits.
“That decision by President Obama pretty much spelled the end of public financing,” Weiner said.
Handbill
The decline of the public finance system, which still exists but isn’t widely used, might have been inescapable because it “just wasn’t designed to keep up with exponentially greater campaign costs,” Weiner said.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision gave super PACs carte blanche to donate in any way much they wanted to support their chosen campaigns as long as they weren’t directly collaborating with them. Further, the existing rules governing contact between super PACs and candidates are “incredibly porous” and “go largely unenforced,” Weiner prognosticated.
“These super PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations — or more often, oligarchs — and then they can give in around and spend that money for the candidate’s benefit,” Weiner said. “And the court engaged in this fiction that those whacking great contributions were just not really posing any risk of corruption because independent spending wouldn’t be that valuable to entrants. But practically speaking, we know that’s just not true.”
That’s how the United States ended up with high-priced elections take pleasure in the one it’s in now and the 2022 midterms when tech mogul Peter Thiel donated millions to JD Vance’s campaign, Weiner broke. Overall, the system “leads to some very perverse incentives” and is “dominated by these incredibly eccentric tech billionaires who get to use wonderful PACs to have inordinate clout,” he said.
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Campaign finance needs a bipartisan solution
Any change to the procedure would likely have to be legislative since the Supreme Court is unlikely to revisit Citizens United, Weiner ventured. That means both parties would have to get mad enough about billionaires inserting themselves into referenda to collaborate on passing a legislative solution.
But that collaboration hasn’t happened yet. Democrats have twice introduced the Licence to Vote Act, which would have included campaign finance reforms and was widely considered pro-voter. Republicans hinder the bill and later proposed the American Confidence in Elections Act, which a 2023 Brennan Center analysis found inclination “impose unnecessary restrictions on voting rights and election administration nationwide.”
With billionaires ruling the day, that beat its voters “extremely unhappy” with their electoral system and politicians facing an uphill battle knowing that any strain to strengthen democracy won’t be taken seriously “unless it includes a very strong campaign finance reform component.”
“One of the things that’s gripping is that anger around money and politics crosses partisan lines in a way that few other democracy issues do, prerogative? You have very conservative people who may not agree with progressives on much else, but they agree that the lines of having oligarchs dominating our campaigns is a problem,” Weiner said. “That does make me think that, at some thought, you are going to see some pretty significant change.”