Democrats enter this year’s midterms with a host of political advantages: a deeply unpopular Republican president, a faltering economy, and a fired-up base. But Republicans hold a clear edge in at least one crucial area. With Election Day less than three months out, fundraising data shows the GOP with vastly more cash on hand. That financial advantage stems entirely from well-funded Republican super PACs and party committees, which together hold over a billion dollars — nearly three times the reserves of comparable Democratic groups.
The GOP’s enormous war chest has been filled primarily by corporate and billionaire donors, who overwhelmingly favor Republicans this cycle. An analysis by reporters at the Washington Post found that this year’s top fifty donors have already contributed around $1.6 billion, with more than a billion of that going to pro-Republican groups and another quarter billion funding “bipartisan” special interest groups. Another report published in March by the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness found that roughly 80 percent of all spending by the fifty biggest billionaire families has gone to Republican candidates and causes.
Meanwhile, at the battered Democratic National Committee (DNC), big donors have “gone on strike,” as a recent Wall Street Journal headline put it. The latest numbers from July show the Republican National Committee sitting on $130 million compared to $16 million at the DNC, which is also $18 million in debt.
This clear billionaire preference for Republicans continues a trend that became unmistakable two years ago, when some of the country’s wealthiest individuals spent record sums to boost Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. A New York Times analysis found that the three hundred wealthiest contributors in 2024 accounted for one-fifth of all federal donations, spending a princely sum of $3 billion. That dwarfs the pre–Citizens United era, when billionaires accounted for just 0.3 percent of federal election spending in 2008.
The explosion in billionaire political spending has coincided with a broader rightward shift among the country’s oligarchs. In 2016, billionaires spent approximately $684 million on federal elections — a record at the time — with only a slight majority of that going to Republicans. Two cycles later, billionaire contributions favored Republicans by a staggering five-to-one margin.
These two trends have, if anything, accelerated since Trump’s return to power last year, with oligarchs leaning into their reactionary politics and opening up their wallets for various conservative and anti-progressive causes.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in California, where the state’s top fifteen billionaire donors have already poured hundreds of millions into this year’s state and federal elections, according to the labor and community coalition California Common Good. As of early July, the top four California-based donors alone — Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Chris Larsen — had given more than $200 million.
Those numbers have continued to climb in the months since, with much of the surge fueled by billionaire opposition to Proposition 40, the wealth tax on the state ballot this year. Eight of the top fifteen donors have contributed to the political committee Building a Better California, which exists chiefly to defeat the measure. California’s biggest political spender this year, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, has funneled more than $100 million into the organization, while his fellow oligarchs have contributed an additional $50 million.
How the Deal Fell Apart
The billionaire backlash in California underscores how the growing force of economic populism inside the Democratic coalition has driven plutocrats to the right.
A decade ago, billionaires were far more circumspect in their political pronouncements and spending decisions, often hedging their bets and splitting their contributions between establishment Republicans and Democrats. Though wealthy donors have historically leaned right, neoliberal Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were broadly acceptable to America’s plutocrats, especially if they hailed from a blue state like California. While these Democratic leaders would occasionally call out reactionary billionaires like the Koch brothers, they were positively chummy with liberal-coded billionaires and steered clear of any policies that might actually challenge their power.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has often invoked what he has called the “deal” to explain that earlier arrangement. According to the billionaire investor, the deal amounted to an unwritten pact between Silicon Valley’s tech elites and Democratic leaders dating back to the Clinton era: entrepreneurs and investors like himself could grow fabulously wealthy and face little scrutiny, so long as they devoted some of their fortunes to liberal causes and philanthropy. By donating to charity and supporting “fashionable” social issues like same-sex marriage, Andreessen observed, the billionaire could “absolve” himself of all his “sins.” This was “just something everybody understood.”
In Andreessen’s telling, the deal’s collapse began about a decade ago, with the millennial generation’s embrace of “radical” politics in light of the financial crisis and the Iraq War. The “kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way,” he complained to the New York Times last year, pointing to Occupy Wall Street and the youth vote for Bernie Sanders. Things only grew worse under Joe Biden, whose administration waged what Andreessen described as a “terror campaign” against billionaires and fledgling industries like crypto and AI.
Overwrought as it is, Andreessen’s sketch of the past decade still captures a real shift that began with the 2016 Sanders campaign and carried through the Biden years. Though a centrist by nature, Biden appointed genuine economic populists and progressives to leadership roles in his administration. Under figures like Lina Khan, Julie Su, and Jennifer Abruzzo, the administration embraced a far more populist posture on antitrust and labor, reviving long-dormant antitrust enforcement and advancing policies to strengthen unionization efforts. These and other shifts infuriated oligarchs like Elon Musk and Andreessen, but for the latter the administration’s proposed “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” — which would have taxed unrealized capital gains — was the “final straw.”
Jumping on the MAGA train has paid off for oligarchs like Andreessen and Musk. The Trump administration has more or less reversed the Biden-era policies and enforcement actions they most opposed, and it has openly advanced a billionaire-first agenda that has accelerated the country’s slide into full-blown oligarchy.
Big Money or Mass Politics
America’s oligarchs have had remarkable success in reshaping the nation’s government and laws over the last twenty months, but their triumph has also awakened many to the breakdown of democracy. If modest efforts to rein in corporate and billionaire power sparked a furious oligarchic backlash in 2024, the oligarchs’ brazen power grab has since stirred a broader populist revolt.
One of the clearest lessons of the 2024 election was that Democrats must embrace economic populism if they hope to win back the support of working-class voters, particularly in must-win battleground states. During her brief presidential run, former Vice President Kamala Harris adopted a more conciliatory posture toward corporate America and strongly hinted that her administration would back down from some of the more populist positions taken during the Biden years. That strategy helped Harris raise a great deal of cash and perhaps earned her a few dozen extra votes from “Cheney Democrats.” But her retreat from economic populism and her refusal to condemn the genocide in Gaza likely cost her millions of votes in an election where a shift of a few hundred thousand could have changed the outcome.
In the two years since, the appeal of economic populism has only grown, as voters have witnessed a hostile billionaire takeover of the US government. The Left’s winning streak in this year’s Democratic primaries has revealed a base that is hungry for candidates willing to challenge institutional power and “fight the oligarchy.” There are other signs of the party’s shift toward economic populism. In a recent analysis of 280,000 fundraising emails sent by Democratic candidates since 2017, Stanford political economist Andrew Hall found that mentions of “billionaire” have soared since the start of Trump’s second term, almost all of them negative. As he observes, “Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging.”
What all of this means for the future of the Democratic Party is unclear. Even as populists and leftists continue to rack up victories in Democratic primaries across the country, the party’s leadership remains hostile to its left flank and cool toward economic populism. Where big donors still back Democratic or “bipartisan” candidates and causes, their money has mostly gone toward stopping the ascendant Left or killing populist proposals like the wealth tax. Special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Comittee (AIPAC) and the pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake have already spent hundreds of millions on House and Senate races this cycle, with most of that going to undermine progressives.
The good news is that big-donor money has clear limits, especially when it runs up against an increasingly frustrated electorate (this was perhaps most evident in 2024, when Kamala Harris actually outraised and outspent her opponent). Despite special interest groups like AIPAC spending heavily to block progressive candidates this cycle, most of those efforts have fallen short. Individual Democratic candidates have also been routinely outraising their Republican opponents thanks to a surge of smaller donations, narrowing the GOP’s overall financial advantage.
Whether these trends will push more Democrats to embrace populism remains to be seen. What’s fairly certain is that billionaires will continue to flee the party as long as progressives and democratic socialists keep gaining ground inside the Democratic coalition. At a certain point, Democratic leaders will have more to lose by angering the Left than by alienating the megadonors who have already left the fold.