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