Title: Can a Billion Dollars Buy an Election?

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Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On this week's show, it's all about the Benjamins.

Speaker: The 2024 election will be the most expensive ever.

Speaker: Harris is outpacing Donald Trump.

Speaker: She has crossed the $1 billion mark.

Speaker: Donald Trump is feeling underappreciated by donors in the final stretch of the race.

Helen Santoro: It's just going to be that our election campaigns continue to be dominated by the uber-wealthy. It's ultimately the average voter who loses out.

Steven Sprick Schuster: If campaign spending is more effective right before someone's got to vote, you just got to make sure you get them right before they vote.

Kenneth Vogel: This guy, Mark Hanna, who had a famous quote saying, there are two things that are important in politics. Money is one, and I forget the other thing.

Brooke Gladstone: Making sense of all those dollars in politics. It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In late September, Donald Trump hosted a handful of his billionaire benefactors for dinner at Trump Tower.

Speaker: Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances.

Brooke Gladstone: The New York Times reports.

Speaker: He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more, and help him more.

Brooke Gladstone: The top five individual donors this election all gave to conservative causes, and that's never happened before. Why is Trump so cranky? You think it may have something to do with his opponent?

Speaker: You'd rather be Kamala Harris's bank account than Donald Trump's right now. She has crossed the $1 billion mark.

Brooke Gladstone: Kamala Harris raised twice as much as Trump in the past three months, cashing big checks from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, Michael Bloomberg, and her longtime friend, Laurene Powell Jobs, former wife of Steve Jobs, but she's not relying on just a few deep pockets.

Speaker: Kamala Harris is outpacing Donald Trump in grassroots financial support. 42% of her funding comes from small donors, compared to 32% for Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: Compared to last election, Trump's campaign has seen a massive drop in the amount raised from small donors, 40%. Did they perhaps hear this news from August?

Speaker: About $50 million in donor money was allocated to help pay for Donald Trump's legal battles in 2023. The majority of his funds have come from small-dollar donors.

Speaker: I am guessing there have to be at least some people who wrote checks who are not happy that those checks are out there paying his lawyers.

Micah Loewinger: Maybe Trump supporters are just tired. They've been prodded for funds for eight years straight, including during Trump's presidency.

Donald J. Trump: This is your favorite president, Donald J. Trump, with some very exciting news. By popular demand, I'm doing a new series of Trump digital trading cards. It's really something. These cards show me dancing. Get your Trump watch right now. It's Trump time. I've seen a lot of coins out there using my very beautiful face. I'm a very beautiful guy. I'm only kidding. They are not the official coin. realtrumpcoins.com is the only--

Andrew Perez: It has put additional pressure on team Trump to court support from billionaire mega-donors.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew Perez, senior politics editor at Rolling Stone.

Andrew Perez: Timothy Mellon Junior has donated $125 million to Trump's primary super PAC called Make America Great Again Inc.

Micah Loewinger: More than any other individual donor this election, the focus of MAGa Inc. has been on ads in battleground states like North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and especially Pennsylvania, like this one, which debuted this month as San Francisco.

Speaker: As San Fransisco DA liberal Kamala Harris let killers go free. Kamala Harris has always put criminals first. Don't make America her next victim.

Micah Loewinger: Here's another top donor for Trump.

Andrew Perez: Miriam Adelson has donated $100 million to a group that she is affiliated with, Preserve America PAC.

Micah Loewinger: Preserve America has no other major donors. Adelson and her late husband Sheldon got rich from their casino business. Also on the donor list--

Andrew Perez: Elon Musk has donated $75 million to his own super PAC, America PAC, which is handling much of the field operations for Team Trump.

Brooke Gladstone: That Trump Tower dinner I mentioned at the top gave us a hint as to how he woos the bigger wigs.

Speaker: Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that these donors had plenty to be grateful to him for. He boasted about how great he had been for their taxes.

Andrew Perez: In his economic advisor Stephen Moore's book, Trump literally talked about how he had cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, the literal highest earners.

Brooke Gladstone: Andrew Perez

Andrew Perez: He brags about this in a book. Imagine what he's doing behind closed doors.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump's never been shy about promising favors to his patrons.

Andrew Perez: Trump is publicly pledging to give Musk some type of just ridiculous job. I think the most recent iteration of that idea was, "You can be the secretary of cost-cutting."

Brooke Gladstone: Thats a position that, by the way, doesnt yet exist. Musk is hardly proving his bona fides with the running of his super PAC.

Andrew Perez: Trump allies have been warning the former president that Elon Musk's super PAC is not killing it in terms of its ground game. There's been reporting about how Elon twice fired the companies that were leading the field project. Their advertising is remarkably cringey. They've started posting screenshots of Elon Musk's tweets in turning them into Facebook ads. It's just like, "What?" It seems like their job is to make Elon Musk feel happy.

Micah Loewinger: Then there was that time in April when Donald Trump hosted a dinner in Mar-a-Lago with a bunch of oil executives.

Andrew Perez: Trump said, "Raise me a billion dollars." He effectively promised them anything they could want, saying that this would be a deal because they would save money on their taxes and he would roll back Biden's clean energy agenda. Trump also promised to fast-track oil company mergers, which have been slowed by the Biden administration. He's been promising the oil industry a suite of goodies. This is a very explicit test of whether there are public corruption rules.

If you can just say, "Raise me a billion dollars and I'll give you XYZ," are there corruption rules in America if that kind of thing is tolerated? I think it's an open question.

Micah Loewinger: Eyebrows were also raised when Trump struck up a relationship with a billionaire investor in TikTok's parent company, a guy named Jeff Yass. Wait, is it Yass or Yass?

Annie Massa: People say Yass, but it's really Yass. It's Yass like Yass Queen.

Micah Loewinger: That's Bloomberg reporter Annie Massa. She recently profiled Yass, who for years has fought for lower taxes, school voucher programs, and keeping Donald Trump out of the White House, in part because of TikTok.

Annie Massa: Listeners will remember he formerly was in support of the idea of banning TikTok in the US.

Donald J. Trump: We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things.

Micah Loewinger: That seemed to change in early March after Yass invited Trump to a Palm Beach retreat organized by Club for Growth, a conservative 501 (c) (4) that had long shunned the former president while spending millions on his competitors.

Annie Massa: Yass and Trump were even seen speaking at that event, though Yass's camp says they didn't discuss TikTok, but nonetheless--

Micah Loewinger: In fact, Trump gave a speech at the Club for Growth event.

Speaker: During which he gave Yass a shout-out, calling the billionaire "fantastic." Then, six days later, on March 7th, Trump suddenly announced that he'd changed his mind about TikTok and came out against banning it.

Annie Massa: Then, in April, Yas writes this op-ed saying Trump is the best candidate in this race. He went from an anybody-but-Trump stance to saying, "I support Trump because of his policies on school choice. Now, it's a little bit cute, maybe, the way that he framed that, because he says, "I won't give directly to Trump, but he's the candidate who is best for the policies that I care about."

Micah Loewinger: In total, Yass has donated $78 million to conservative groups and candidates this election, making him the second-largest individual donor. Oh, and by the way, he's on Trump's shortlist for treasury secretary.

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Brooke Gladstone: We're going to go deep into campaign finance this hour because so much has changed from where that money comes from and where it goes to the media landscape that absorbs the lion's share of that cash. Turns out, following the campaign money is really quite tough. As for the question of how many votes those billions can actually buy, the answer may surprise you.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, how democrats stopped worrying and learned to love dark money.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. This week, we're following the money.

Speaker: The new concerns about the power of dark money.

Speaker: It is everywhere, yet it's invisible. Undisclosed donors pouring unlimited funds into causes and candidates they prefer.

Speaker: Big donors give to social welfare nonprofits. Unlike super PACS, those nonprofits never have to reveal where the money is coming from.

Speaker: In this cycle, there is more than ever. Over $162 million in federal political contributions in 2023, and the beat goes on in 2024.

Micah Loewinger: The watchdog group Open Secrets estimates that contributions from dark money groups may outpace all prior elections, even the 2020 election, which amassed over $1 billion of dark money.

President Joe Biden: Dark money erodes public trust.

Micah Loewinger: President Joe Biden in September 2022 announcing his support for the Disclose Act, which would require dark money groups to disclose donors who contribute over $10,000.

President Joe Biden: We need to protect public trust, and I'm determined to do that.

Micah Loewinger: The bill ultimately failed to pass, as it has several times before, but even as Democrats have tried to reform campaign finance laws, they've been happy to have their coffers filled, in some cases even more than Republicans. How did we get here?

Kenneth Vogel: You could go back to the robber barons funding McKinley's campaign through this guy, Mark Hanna, who had a famous quote saying, there are two things that are important in politics. Money is one, and I forget the other thing.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Kenneth Vogel covers money, influence, and politics for the New York Times. His reporting traces the dark money political infrastructure that has been quietly shaping elections for years now.

Kenneth Vogel: There was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, McCain Feingold, in 2002, and that clamped down on, one, flow of big money into politics, soft money, and so we saw groups on both sides, but particularly on the right, most notably the Koch brothers, the billionaire industrialists out of Kansas, Charles Koch and his now deceased brother, David Koch, who started convening major donors to give what we now think of as dark money to a network of groups that they oversaw that sought to influence the political process and elections, though it was not directly.

They talk about funding advocacy efforts on the issues that they care about, like small government, low taxation, but also getting out the vote.

Micah Loewinger: Much of the work of the Koch brothers began before the landmark Supreme Court decision, Citizens United. That was the case that really unleashed this type of hard-to-trace political spending in our politics. How did it supercharge what the Koch brothers were already doing?

Kenneth Vogel: The Koch brothers were mindful of the restrictions that prohibited them from spending this type of dark money on what's called express advocacy. This is the legal term that refers to essentially what you think of a campaign ad that would say, "Vote for so and so or vote against so and so."

What happened with the Citizens United decision is it basically did away with those restrictions that the Koch brothers and others were dancing around and said, "No, no, no. You can use this dark money on express advocacy, and you can use this dark money to go out and run an attack ad that directly and explicitly urges voters to oppose a candidate or a gauzy biographical ad that urges them to support a candidate."

Now, it's interesting. The Koch brothers were actually a little bit slow to take advantage of that new flexibility. They had become set in their ways and liked the idea that they weren't actually overtly partisan political, even though by all appearances they were. Other groups rushed in very aggressively to take advantage of that new flexibility, and it was largely on the right.

Micah Loewinger: Just ten days after the decision, President Obama stood before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address, where he said.

President Barack Obama: Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our election.

Micah Loewinger: President Barack Obama was critical of this creeping influence of money and politics. He seemed committed to campaign finance reform.

Kenneth Vogel: He was a reformer through and through. When he was in the Senate, he actually pushed legislation that required the disclosure of lobbyist bundlers, that is, lobbyists who collect checks from other donors and deliver them to campaigns. This was one of the reforms that was introduced after the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. In 2008, it seemed like he was going to revolutionize money in politics by tapping into small donors.

He raised record sums from small donors, and then when Citizens United happened, he spoke out against it and called for some reforms.

President Barack Obama: This ruling gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way or to punish those who don't.

Micah Loewinger: At a certain point under his administration, it kind of shifted. Right?

Kenneth Vogel: When his re-election campaign rolled around, he begrudgingly ended up embracing super PACs. That was another shift that signaled that the gloves were off and both sides were going to aggressively pursue it to exact political advantage.

Micah Loewinger: You've written about this moment where he's at the founder of Costco's house in Seattle in 2012. He's with some donors, and we can see his transformation in action.

Kenneth Vogel: Yes, this is a February 2012 fundraiser that Obama attended with some of the richest people in the country, including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer. He's simultaneously juicing them and doing the fundraiser thing, but also bemoaning the state of national politics with the explosion of funds that filed Citizens United. He turns to Bill Gates and he says, "Bill could write a check. Actually, there are probably five or six people in this room tonight that could simply make a decision, 'This will be the next president,' and probably get at least a nomination, and that's not the way that things are supposed to work."

He's talking about the Koch brothers. He says in this election, he'll be able to hopefully match whatever check the Koch brothers want to write. He goes on to suggest if he's re-elected, which obviously, he ultimately was, that maybe he would be able to try to push legislation that would dial back the effects of Citizens United.

He won, obviously, but we saw the opposite happen, which was the beginning of an arms race almost immediately towards the 2016 election, with Hillary Clinton and her rivals on the right, notably not really Donald Trump, going out and raising huge funds and having blessed super PACs that set off this arms race that we now see as a permanent feature of American politics.

Micah Loewinger: Jumping ahead to 2020, you reported in the New York Times a couple of years ago that for the first time ever, the Democrats didn't just catch up to the GOP's dark money spending, they outpaced it. What happened?

Kenneth Vogel: Part of it was certainly Trump. Liberal donors were really freaked out, frankly, and didn't want him to win re-election, saw it as a real existential threat to our democracy, and so got more comfortable with this type of spending that they had previously had qualms about. Another part of it is you had new donors coming in who didn't really have that kind of baggage.

The phrase the Democratic operatives used to try to coax these donors to start loosening the purse strings was that we can't unilaterally disarm. Otherwise, the right is going to keep on winning elections and is going to be able to prevent any kind of reform in this space. That argument started to resonate, and then we also saw new types of dark money spending that the left really embraced, like the use of dark money to fund voter registration efforts.

It was really a confluence of factors that made the left get comfortable with this type of spending that they had once abhorred.

Micah Loewinger: You described this as a leapfrogging phenomenon where the Democrats copy and build off what they see Republican dark money groups are doing, and then vice versa. Some of these liberal groups had actually built on the Koch brothers' tactic of using centralized hubs to disseminate dark money to a bigger network.

Kenneth Vogel: The Koch brothers did two things. They both raised money directly into their organizations, but they also recommended groups to donors, and the donors would come to these convenings, they called them seminars, to learn about what new groups might be doing. The left sat up and took notice and thought that they needed to have something similar. What we saw was a network of groups on the left that are administered by a for-profit consulting firm called Arabella Advisors.

They oversaw the fundraising and bringing in the funds and also the spending, and they also oversaw staffing and the directions of these groups in a way that was in some ways more centralized and top-down than what you had seen with the Koch brothers network. Much like the left's effort to copy the Koch brothers, it spawned copycat efforts on the right. There were conservatives, most notably Leonard Leo, the conservative legal activist, who saw what the Arabella network was doing and wanted to start an analog on the right and did ultimately do just that.

Micah Loewinger: It's not only the case that more dark money is likely in this election than ever before. You say that it's spreading into even more corners of political campaigns and that the money is getting closer to the candidates themselves.

Kenneth Vogel: Part of that is because the outside groups are getting bolder and they're trying to merge the super PACs with the campaigns in a way that flouts the reasoning behind the Citizens United decision, which was that, you can't really have the corrupting influence of big money in politics if there is a legal separation between the candidates themselves and the big donor-funded groups on the outside. This firewall was seen as a key feature of it.

Micah Loewinger: Yet the Federal Elections Commission recently came out with a ruling that seems to weaken this basic regulation.

Kenneth Vogel: Yes, and it's only the latest in a series of rulings that have put the lie to this notion that there is a separation between the outside big money and the dark money and the campaigns and the candidates who benefit from it. This latest ruling said that the outside groups can coordinate their canvassing efforts, the door knocking, the basic blocking and tackling of politics. That they can do this in coordination with the candidates' campaigns.

Micah Loewinger: Although this election is slated to have the biggest flood of dark money ever, it seems like we're hearing less and less about it, including in the press. Is that something you've noticed, too?

Kenneth Vogel: It's just harder to report on and certainly harder to report on in real-time because it's dark money, because even when you do get top-line figures that come in that can form the basis to try to figure out the money trail, if not to trace back to a specific donor, at least to trace back to a specific group, that information doesn't come in until more than a year after the election because it comes into the Internal Revenue Service as opposed to the Federal Election Commission.

You don't find out about these things until years later because there are so many steps and hoops that donors and operatives can funnel the money through that unless you know exactly what you're looking for and have the techniques and frankly, the lawyers, you're not going to get it. That's a huge disadvantage, not just to reporters at national organizations like myself, but in local media outlets and to voters.

If I can't get a filing with the help of the New York Times lawyers, it's highly unlikely that a concerned citizen who saw an ad that they wondered who funded, they're going to remember a year later to go try to track down this information. If they hit the same brick walls that we hit, seems a lot less likely that they're going to be able to circumnavigate them and get the information that would allow them to be a more informed voter.

Micah Loewinger: Even your own reporting into dark money spending in the last presidential election came with a big caveat that this was your best guess at how much money was coming and from which groups.

Kenneth Vogel: We got some pushback from that. People who said, "Well, what about this group?" or "Did you ever consider that?" Without some kind of systematized disclosure regimen that reveals this information in real time, there's just going to be more questions than answers.

Micah Loewinger: With the kind of money that's being raised by both sides, the feeling that this has just become an entrenched part of our political reality, do you think that it's possible for us to break this cycle?

Kenneth Vogel: It's really hard to see how, Micah. I say that for a few reasons. Number one is there's not a lot of incentive for politicians who win election under a system that they are able to navigate to their advantage to go back and change that system. Number two is this cycle where you have a scandal leading to regulation and then creative operatives or donors trying to find new ways to navigate the new regulations and potentially leading to another scandal.

We've seen so many scandals, and frankly, just the sheer amount of dark money that's flowing into the system should be a scandal unto itself. What more are you looking for? Are you looking for the briefcase full of cash that leads to a vote? We've seen some of that, even, and that doesn't necessarily move the needle. It's tough to figure what type of scandal or what type of political movement might generate the will or light a fire under the body politic to enact changes.

In fact, it looks in some ways like there might be more momentum behind an effort to go even further the other direction, and that is to erode the disclosure regimen that has long been an article of faith. Not with dark money, but with other types of money, make it harder to figure out who is giving types of money that are currently required to be disclosed. We've seen some efforts by conservative groups to whittle away at that. In some ways, it's possible that we could see even less regulation before we see more.

Micah Loewinger: Ken, thank you very much.

Kenneth Vogel: It was a pleasure.

Kenneth Vogel covers money, influence, and politics for the New York Times.

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To recap, campaign finance regulations are being eroded even as donations are pouring in on either side of the political aisle, approaching a projected $16 billion when you factor in congressional races. It's Kamala Harris who is currently winning the money game with her $1 billion war chest. Helen Santoro, who covers money and politics at The Lever, wrote about the vice president's past as a campaign finance reformer and her recent reversal.

Helen Santoro: As attorney general and a California senator, Harris was really outspoken about the dangerously influential role of dark money in our political system.

Kamala Harris: It does not represent justice in America when dark money is fueling elections and when the few who have the greatest amount of wealth behind a veil, without even presenting themselves or their names, manipulate and fuel the election process.

Helen Santoro: In 2014, as attorney general, she was actually sued by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity Foundation. That foundation was founded by Charles Koch. She was sued for seeking the names and addresses of the donors. When she was a California senator in 2019, she called out the Citizens United decision.

Kamala Harris: When elected, one of my first areas of high priority would be to overturn Citizens United and to take money out of this process.

Helen Santoro: She also, that same year co-sponsored the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections or the Disclose Act, again, trying to bring more transparency to who is donating, specifically donors who had given $10,000 or more during an election cycle. She really has quite a strong history of trying to increase donor transparency.

Micah Loewinger: Just to add a little bit to the Disclose Act. This has been introduced so many times since the Citizens United decision in 2010, initially by Chuck Schumer, but to the credit of Democrats, they have consistently put this bill forward. No?

Helen Santoro: It was 2010, Chuck Schumer. The bill didn't go anywhere. 2019, Harris co-sponsored it. Bill didn't go anywhere. 2022, it was reintroduced after President Joe Biden urged its passage. Didn't go anywhere.

Micah Loewinger: Now, as vice president and presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has stopped talking about dark money. In fact, her campaign has brought in millions of dollars in undisclosed donations. Just how much money are we talking?

Helen Santoro: Just from one main dark money group, a whopping $20 million donation a week after Harris became the party's presumed nominee.

Micah Loewinger: $56 million from Future Forward USA. Who are they?

Helen Santoro: Future Forward USA is the main group that was created to back Biden and now is backing Harris. How the dark money works is a little confusing, which is probably part of why it's so dark. This Future Forward USA Action, they're a 501 (c) (4) nonprofit. 501 (c) (4) nonprofits do not have to disclose their donors. However, Future Forward USA Action is associated with the political action group Future Forward.

Some undisclosed donor gives money to Future Forward USA Action, the nonprofit, which then gives its money to the PAC, Future Forward, which then can contribute to Harris's campaign. Yes, they've given nearly 56 million this election cycle.

Micah Loewinger: Tell me a little bit more about some of the other main dark money groups that Kamala Harris has benefited from. What do we know about them?

Helen Santoro: One of the big ones is the Sixteen Thirty Fund. It's a well-known charitable organization that supports liberal agendas. There's a Swiss billionaire who actually resides in Wyoming who contributes a lot to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, along with other multimillion and billionaires.

Micah Loewinger: Actually, the New York Times had a 2022 investigation that found that the Sixteen Thirty Fund had spent $410 million in 2020 to help Joe Biden and other liberal campaigns in that election. That was more money than the DNC spent in that election.

Helen Santoro: Yes. That's really the concerning thing that's going on behind the scenes of these democratic elections that really just seems to not be covered. There's been a lot of coverage on, say, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization that has dark money ties and supports President Trump as part of the whole Project 2025 agenda, but not a lot of coverage on the fact that Democrats have been decrying the influence of dark money and yet receiving tons of money from organizations like the Sixteen Thirty Fund.

Micah Loewinger: We talked a little bit about how Kamala Harris was a proponent of campaign finance reform in the Senate and even, to some extent, as attorney general in California. Given Harris's focus on this before she entered the White House, what kind of action could she have made over the past four years?

Helen Santoro: The filibuster has been repeatedly used to stop the Disclose Act. However, there's a complicated process that actually could have been used to bypass the filibuster. Experts say Democrats could use what's called budget reconciliation, which allows them to bypass the filibuster and pass bills that impact the federal budget.

Because there has been government research concluding that the Disclose Act would have impacted the federal budget, technically, that means that Harris, as vice president and presiding officer of the Senate, she has technically been in a position to overrule any objections to the Disclose Act process and use this budget reconciliation to help pass the Disclose act, but they've never tried this maneuver. It's yet to be seen if it would actually work out that smoothly.

Micah Loewinger: It does seem to me that the Democrats are using a realpolitik justification. They're basically saying they need to take dark money the way Republicans have, and that without fighting fire with fire, the electoral playing field would be so tilted against Democrats, they'd have no chance of staving off an increasingly extremist candidate and his party and surely have no chance of pushing through the campaign finance reforms in Congress that they've been talking about.

Yes, it definitely feels hypocritical. On the other hand, is it really reasonable to expect Kamala Harris to take some big, virtuous stand in this election and forego all of this cash, given what's at stake?

Helen Santoro: That's exactly what legislators on the Democratic side have been saying. Like, "We have no choice but to play ball if we want to remain competitive here, people." Listen, I think it's important to remember that there was a time before the 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United, that allowed corporations to donate unlimited amount of money towards election campaigns. A lot of people might recognize.

Mitt Romney: Corporations are people, my friend. Of course, they are.

Micah Loewinger: That infamous quote from Mitt Romney.

Helen Santoro: Yes. This idea that this is the only way to run elections through the elite swaying with their money, I just don't think is true. I would love to see if Harris is elected or other democratic legislators putting more of their money where their mouth is.

Micah Loewinger: One potential solution for combating the influence from the mega-rich in our elections is a model known as small-donor financing systems. Can you break down how that works?

Helen Santoro: It's being used right now in New York. They allocate a certain amount of money, in the case of New York state, 25 million, to match contributions from individual donors. You donate $10, the public funds can match that $10 to help up your individual contributions. There was actually a really interesting analysis on this system from 2023 by Open Secrets and the New York University School of Law's Brennan Center for Justice.

They found that if this type of campaign financing program was in place in 2022, small donors could have actually accounted for 41% of statewide candidates' funds in New York, as opposed to just 6%. That's a huge difference. If states are willing to put aside this money to match individual donations, it could potentially really increase the influence of the average donor as opposed to just the 1% ultra-wealthy donors.

Micah Loewinger: Beyond the obvious anti-democratic implications of allowing corporations and the ultra-rich to have such an outsized influence on our elections, what are the main tangible harms of our elected officials taking so much money from special interest groups when they're running for office?

Helen Santoro: Although a lot of legislators like to say that even though they're taking this money, they're not influenced by the special interests of who is donating that money, the idea that a special interest corporation can donate tens of millions and then the name of the game there isn't to give them benefits, I think is a bit ridiculous. The special interests are going to be able to have far more say than the average citizen. At the end of the day, you are going to have politicians who are looking more out for those special interests that are giving them all of that money than the average constituent.

Micah Loewinger: What's the path forward from here? What do you think is on the line if Kamala Harris doesn't engage in meaningful campaign finance reform if she's elected president?

Helen Santoro: It's ultimately the average voter who loses out. It's just going to be that our election campaigns continue to be dominated by the uber-wealthy, as they have been at an increasing rate since 2010 when the Citizens United Supreme Court decision passed. It's really a question of if elected, is Harris going to use her presidential power to push for dark money reform? Is the Disclose Act going to come up again, or is she going to allow secretive donors to continue influencing US politics?

I hope she wants to continue pushing for that reform as she did as senator and attorney general in California, but that remains to be seen.

Micah Loewinger: Helen, thank you very much.

Helen Santoro: Thank you for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Helen Santoro is a reporter at The Lever, where she reports on money and politics.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a million here, a million there. It adds up, but what does it actually buy?

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. For now, raising stupefying amounts of money both over and under the table seems to be an impregnable feature of our electoral process, unstoppable, but it does beg a bigger fundamental question about all that cash. Does it make you a winner?

Steven Sprick Schuster: The big question is whether or not they win because they raise the most money, or if they win and they happen to raise the most money.

Brooke Gladstone: Steven Sprick Schuster is a professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University and a member of the Political Economy Research Institute. He says it's hard to draw a straight line between spending and winning, and that any such effort requires working through data that's knotted with power and influence, and, of course, a little luck.

Steven Sprick Schuster: Some really good research that has looked at how candidates get selected has tried to answer, for example, why lawyers are so overrepresented in Congress. One of the reasons appears to be that they're really good at raising money, but the thing that makes them really good at raising money is they know a bunch of other wealthy lawyers. Even if money doesn't matter in the campaign, it could be a good signal of candidate quality.

Brooke Gladstone: The most recent case of money failing to deliver the win is Hillary Clinton. Her campaign and allies spent $1.2 billion, whereas Trump's campaign and his allies spent half that. Now, one could argue that among those allies was CNN, whose ratings skyrocketed whenever Trump was on the screen, and of course, Trump also had Fox News. The rest of the media weren't immune to his ratings-building allure either. That's what we call earned media. Trump earned it by being a ratings magnet rather than buying it.

Is it about being on TV, which, of course, takes the lion's share of campaign financing?

Steven Sprick Schuster: There's two different ways you could look at it. It certainly is evidence that money isn't deterministic, but you could also say, "Well, sure, but if Hillary had just spent some more money or gone to Wisconsin, if she had spent her money differently, that she would have won." That's very much an open question. The general findings are that money, it doesn't have this huge marginal effect, but there appear to be good and bad ways of spending money.

I don't think any amount of spending could replace what he got. When voters get ads, they know it's from candidates, they know that they're trying to be persuaded. The fact that Trump got exposure, that wasn't buying a message, that was in some ways potentially more effective than the equivalent ad buy.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, some researchers have found that spending lots of money is much more likely to move the needle for challengers rather than incumbents.

Steven Sprick Schuster: That's a really interesting debate that's happening within political science. Gary Jacobson, the original political scientist on campaign spending, argued that people don't know challengers. If a challenger spends money, it elevates their status. Incumbents are burdened. People already have opinions. People argue this as well. I'm not sure I find that argument super convincing because if I was an incumbent, I can convince people either by running positive messages for me or negative messages about the other person. I would spend my money talking about how bad the other person is.

I actually suspect the findings that challenger spending is more effective has a lot to do with the way we measure spending. Incumbents, especially safe incumbents, spend more money than almost anyone. Nancy Pelosi is going to be one of the highest spenders in Congress every year until she retires. She's not doing that to win an election. She spends a ton of money on fundraising, and she spends a ton of money distributing it out to other Democrats.

If it's a foot race, incumbents are starting way closer to the finish line than challengers. We can think about spending as buying footsteps towards the finish line.

Brooke Gladstone: In this framework, how would you classify Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? Which is the incumbent? Do they exist outside of that traditional binary?

Steven Sprick Schuster: If I had to choose, I would say that Trump is the incumbent.

Brooke Gladstone: So would I. He is so much better known.

Steven Sprick Schuster: Exactly. Now, the only caveat there is that one of the components of incumbency, advantage or disadvantage, relates to the status quo. If people think things are going great, they tend to vote for the incumbent. If they think things are going lousy, they tend to vote for the challenger. Now, in that regard, I think the roles are to some extent flipped. Trump's most challenger-like messaging is about the state of the world now and how much blame of that is on Harris.

Brooke Gladstone: Last month, the New York Times reported that Harris and Trump, their campaigns, and their associated PACs and backers plan to spend a combined $500 million on TV and radio ads, a fifth of which will be headed to Pennsylvania alone, and healthy shares are going to other swing states, but is that worth all that money?

Steven Sprick Schuster: One of the problems that we struggle with in trying to answer this question is the fact that when we observe changes, we're never comparing having ads to not having ads. We're comparing having 101 ads to 100 ads. Imagine that we're in the 12th round of two heavyweight pugilists battling it out, and they're just throwing punches and haymakers at each other, and they're exhausted. In their last round, they're just throwing these weak punches to each other.

When we're thinking about the effect of the next ad, it's that next punch after all of these things that have already happened. That might be very different than thinking about the overall effectiveness of ads.

Brooke Gladstone: You quoted a study done by Lynn Vavreck at UCLA. She and her team looked at where TV boundaries differ from state boundaries, like in Eastern Alabama, no one is going to assume that this county is going to go blue, but because the TV markets, you're getting a bunch of Georgia ads for Kamala.

Steven Sprick Schuster: They find that for every 100 ads, it increases the vote share by a fifth of a percent. Man, that's a lot for a little.

Brooke Gladstone: These hundreds of million dollars are good for maybe a few thousand votes, but a few really important thousand votes?

Steven Sprick Schuster: Yes. You could say maybe it's 10,000, maybe it's 40,000. In a country of 330 million people, that's a very small number, but they're bombarding these states because TV ads, among all the tools that campaigns have, that's a shotgun. It's a very imprecise instrument, but it can be powerful.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about down-ballot races. Representatives, senators, governors. You've said that as you go down the ballot, the effectiveness increases.

Steven Sprick Schuster: I referenced that Vavreck article. They do up-and-down ballot stuff. That's a technical term, up-and-down ballot stuff. They found that spending on down-ballot elections was two to three times as effective, potentially even more than that, compared to presidential elections. People don't know as much about their own representative.

Brooke Gladstone: As with incumbency, name recognition is important.What about the impact of gerrymandering?

Steven Sprick Schuster: If name recognition is important, gerrymandering could potentially heighten the impact of campaign spending. Here in Nashville in 2022, there was one district that governed all of Nashville, all of Davidson County, and it was split up into three. If you drive around town, you see ads for six different people running for three different races. People would be forgiven for not knowing, "Who's actually going to be on my ballot?"

Brooke Gladstone: If your district is shaped like, I don't know, a mandrake route, the person across the street may have a different slate of candidates to vote for.

Steven Sprick Schuster: That's exactly right.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about negative versus positive campaigning. Negative campaigning is extremely effective if you're an incumbent and you want to say how bad the challenger is, but the challenger has the incumbent's public record to challenge.

Steven Sprick Schuster: The research is very inconclusive as to whether or not negative campaigning is inherently more effective. Economist Vincent Geloso, George Mason, he actually has a new paper out that shows that when there's too much negative advertising, people just flock towards third-party candidates. He's talking about non-presidential campaigns, but that does highlight what you want to do is create a negative image in the mind of the voters about the other party person without them thinking that you're a nasty person. You tend to want to create the frame through which the other person is seen.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that the money spent on ads, which is the biggest cause for most campaigns, is about demobilization versus mobilization. Would you explain that?

Steven Sprick Schuster: People could potentially be motivated to go out and vote because they see an ad, but there's a lot of evidence that discouraging people to vote is really effective. One of the reasons why is mechanical. You don't know the people out there who don't vote but might vote, but you know who the people who vote for your opponent are. They're on the voter rolls. You know, "Hey, here's a registered Republican who voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections. I know that they are a white, suburban woman."

Now, it could be that they are voting for you, but you're also going to catch a lot of people who are voting for the other person who could be convinced to not vote for Trump. You can target them. It is a lot harder to identify the non-voters who are almost going to vote for you. Targeting them is going to be much, much more expensive.

Brooke Gladstone: The cost of these ads is skyrocketing. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and yet no hard evidence that it actually works. Are we just creating an arms race?

Steven Sprick Schuster: That's such an interesting question. Let's go back to the argument about challenger and incumbent spending. Steven Levitt published an article in 1994 that found this idea of ineffective incumbent spending. He wasn't the first one to do it, but he was probably the biggest name to have done it. He makes a really astute policy point from that, which is that if challenger spending is more effective, then caps on spending are going to hurt challengers more.

Now, of course, if incumbent spending isn't significantly less effective, then caps are going to have the exact opposite effect. Even if campaign spending is ineffective, I don't think it automatically follows that we should restrict campaign spending.

Brooke Gladstone: We have the example of other countries. In Britain, they have a six-week campaign or less, and there's only so much money you can spend. They still manage to elect leaders. I don't know that they do any better or worse than we do.

Steven Sprick Schuster: I think they have quite a few more restrictions on the ways in which campaign activity can be conducted. A lot of countries have a blackout period where you cannot run ads in the lead-up to an election. There's quite a bit of evidence that persuasion decays fairly quickly. Research from 2017 by Joshua Kalla at Yale and David Broockman, who's at Berkeley, they did a series of field experiments that found the average effect appeared to be about zero.

It's the best arrow in the quiver of people who say that campaigns aren't effective at all. Now, of course, they'd have a lot of caveats. One of the things that they found was that persuasion does appear to happen as long as you measure it quickly, but it seems to decay. Now, if you go back to my paper, I map out the timing of spending. This is why we are looking into the Hellmouth right now because if campaign spending is more effective right before someone's got to vote, you just got to make sure you get them right before they vote.

Policies could sap the purchasing power of campaign spending if we had a blackout period. Free speech is not being infringed, but ad buys are restricted over this period.

Brooke Gladstone: To sum up, given the thicket of judicial, legal, financial, and structural elements that make up our peculiar way of elections, where does money stand in terms of impact?

Steven Sprick Schuster: It's not going to win you an election alone, but you'd be a fool not to have any.

Brooke Gladstone: Steven, thank you very much.

Steven Sprick Schuster: Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Steven Sprick Schuster is a professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University and a member of the Political Economy Research Institute.

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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