Fleecing the votes: Where do election campaign donations really go? - opinion

We are in the closing days of the most expensive election in history, from the presidency all the way down the ballot. By the time the voting is over and the votes are counted, recounted, challenged, litigated, and denied, it could run over $16 billion. That’s equal to the GDP of more than 50 small countries.

Anyone with an email account, snail mailbox, phone, or front door has been incessantly nudged for money. Just send $3 to show your support, they beg.

What do you get for your $3? More than you’ll ever want. You’ve just made a lifelong friend – actually many, many friends – who will be knocking on your door for eternity.

It won’t end when the polls close. Like the proverbial bad penny, it will keep repeating and repeating – and repeating. You’ll quickly learn that the next election begins before all the votes are even counted on this one.

You’ll never feel neglected. Your contribution was just a down payment. It’s a gift that will keep on giving. Your name and all the information about you – some of which you didn’t even realize you were sharing – will be sliced, diced, and sorted into pieces to be traded endlessly. Mailing lists are a precious commodity in the political world.

I’m not saying don’t contribute to candidates or causes you want to help, just beware, be anonymous if you wish, and be prepared. You may wish to volunteer instead. Just protect your information. Caveat emptor.

If you want to test this, change the spelling of your first name or add a middle name or something unique when filling out the contribution and identify the spam as it rushes in.

Candidates like small contributions because they offer a useful measure of grassroots support and because they don’t come with strings attached. But they covet the big bucks.

Billion-dollar campaigns aren’t built on $3 donations. The Supreme Court opened the floodgates in 2010 with the disastrous 5-to-4 Citizens United ruling that removed longstanding campaign finance restrictions and allowed corporations and other outside groups to pour unlimited funds into elections.

Democrats and Republicans spend big

Both parties are equal-opportunity abusers of this bad decision. OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks political spending, estimates that total spending for this year’s elections for president, Congress, and other offices will be $15.9 billion. That doesn’t include money spent on the challenges, recounts, lawsuits, and aftermath – if 2020 is any indication. About $5 billion is coming from super PACs, the group reports. This is outside money with no limits on how much can be raised and spent with this caveat: The PACs can’t coordinate with the candidates. This is dark money, which means anonymity for contributors.

Where does the money go? Whether it is your $3 or Elon Musk’s $75 million or Miriam Adelson’s $100 million? 

Most of it goes to those incessant and obnoxious ads we’ve been suffering through so much in recent months. AdImpact, which follows political advertising, estimates some $10.1 billion will be spent on broadcast, cable, radio, satellite, digital, and CTV advertising, with about half going to local TV stations in this election cycle. About $1.7 billion will be spent on the presidential race, it estimates.

Democrats have been outspending their Republican counterparts in Senate races this cycle, OpenSecrets reports, but Republicans have the lead in House contests. Four super PACs aligned with Congressional leaders have raised nearly $72 million from dark money interests, the group noted. 

IF YOUR $3 gets you a friend for life and endless appeals, what do the fat cats get? 

Adelson and her late husband, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, have long been Trump’s and the GOP’s largest contributors. Just this year she contributed $100 million to help reelect the former president. (That’s about half of what the couple had donated to other Republicans.) She reportedly wants Trump to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, a goal of the right-wing Netanyahu government. Her husband was a driving force in convincing Trump to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s official capital, as well as the State’s annexation of the Golan Heights. She also has major gaming industry interests.

The Adelson-backed Republican Jewish Coalition is spending $15 million on ads to support Trump and Republicans, while on the Left, J Street, the pro-peace lobby, has raised $6 million for the Harris campaign.

Musk’s $75 million contribution is chump change for the world’s richest man. He may have greater ambitions, though. He is holding rallies for Trump, and X, his social media platform, looks like a branch of the Trump campaign. “Musk’s money has funded ads employing dog-whistle antisemitism,” according to Haaretz. 

Trump said that, if elected, he would appoint Musk to head a government efficiency commission that would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit” of the federal government and recommend reforms. It’s a job with lots of clout, little accountability, enormous opportunity for abuse, and won’t need Senate confirmation. Musk has already received over $15 billion in federal contracts for Space X since 2003 and billions more on other projects.

Big contributions often come with big expectations and big rewards: ambassadorships, cabinet posts, plum jobs, and favorable policies.

Former president Barack Obama named 31 major donors from his reelection campaign to serve as ambassadors and Trump topped that with 44, according to Newsweek. Vice President Kamala Harris may not have as many billionaires as Trump, but she has raised twice as much as the former president despite coming into the race late, according to media accounts. 

There are greater rewards than a glamorous embassy.

Trump told oil and gas executives dining at his Mar-a-Lago golf club last spring that if they could raise a billion dollars for his campaign he would dismantle and repeal the Biden administration’s climate rules, The Washington Post reported.  

All campaigns sell merchandise – hats, T-shirts, buttons, and banners – because they are great advertising as well as income. Trump has added his own twist. He’s peddling Bibles, wristwatches, trading cards, sneakers, cologne, picture books, cryptocurrency, and other tchotchkes. Customers may think they’re helping his campaign, but most if not all the income really goes into his pocket.

The campaign finance system is deeply flawed. It can’t be fixed until those responsible in all three branches of government who made it that way – and benefit from it – decide it’s time to clean it up, and they don’t seem very interested.

One final word on this election. Half of the country will be happy and gloating, and the other half disappointed. If you don’t vote, you have no right to kvetch or kvell about it for the next four years.

The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and a former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.