Who Exactly Pays For All These Repulsive, Deceitful Campaign Ads?

Neo-Nazi billionaires Elizabeth & Richard Uihlein-- luckily most of the candidates they fund lose

Yesterday, The Hill listed the top ten political contributors of 2022— over half a billion dollars between the 10 of them, most of it (62%) to benefit Republicans, including outright Nazis.

• George Soros (D)- $128.5 million

• Richard Uihlein (Nazi)- $80.7 million

• Kenneth Griffin (R)- $68.6 million

• Jeff Yass (Nazi)- $47.3 million

• Timothy Mellon (R)- $40 million

• Sam Bankman-Fried (D)- $39.8 million

• Fred Eychaner (D)- 35.8 million

• Stephen Schwarzman (R)- $35.5 million

• Peter Thiel (Nazi)- $32.6 million

• Larry Ellison (R)- $31 million

The Hill noted that these mega-donors gave most of their money to outside groups such as super PACs that can raise and spend unlimited sums on election ads.

On Thursday, Open Secrets reported that close to $17 billion has been spent on state and federal elections this cycle— $8.9 billion on federal candidates and $7.8 billion in state races (including ballot measures). This is considerably more than in previous midterms elections:

The biggest expenditures have gone towards Senate races, mostly the close ones like Pennsylvania and Georgia. Outside groups spent about $1.9 billion to influence federal elections through Oct. 31, blowing past the 2018 midterm outside spending record of $1.6 billion, adjusted for inflation. The biggest outside spenders are the super PACs run by the NRSC, NRCC, DSCC, DCCC, McConnell’s SuperPAC (#1 at $205.4 million), Schumer’s SuperPAC (131.5 million ), McCarthy’s SuperPAC (#2 at $188.1 million) and Pelosi’s SuperPAC ($93.6 million).

Jonathan Weisman and Rachel Shorey wrote up the NY Times’ 2022 fundraising story on Thursday, noting that “In the money race between America’s billionaires and small donors, the emerging political oligarchy is showing staying power. Both parties have megadonors, but Republicans have far more.” They report that much of the out-of-control spending has come “from largely unregulated super PACs financed with enormous checks written mainly by Republican megadonors.”

The American campaign finance system increasingly mirrors American society, with hundreds of thousands of small donors trying to keep pace with a billionaire class whose spending appears nimble and bottomless. Democrats have largely kept up on the airwaves by constantly hectoring rank-and-file supporters to pitch in.

But (largely untaxed) billionaires from high finance, Silicon Valley, media and old-line manufacturing have given party-aligned ideological groups— mainly conservative ones— an easy way to surge forward. And as inflation pinches small donors, megadonors are becoming all the more important.

…Of the 25 top donors this cycle, 18 are Republican, according to Open Secrets, and they have outspent Democrats by $200 million. Billionaires make up 20 percent of total Republican donations compared with 14.5 percent of Democratic donations.

Even that may understate the disparity.

The largest donor of 2022, by far, was a Democrat, George Soros, whose contributions of at least $126 million were nearly double the roughly $67 million that the next two largest donors, the Republicans Richard Uihlein and Kenneth C. Griffin, ponied up each.

But the Soros total is deceptive. Virtually all of Soros’ contributions, $125 million, went to his political action committee, Democracy PAC, which in turn disbursed only a small fraction of it, about $15 million.

In contrast, the $135 million from Uihlein, head of the Uline packaging giant, and Griffin, founder of Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has flooded the Republican ecosystem with political advertising that may soon help secure Republican control of Congress.

Griffin made his hopes clear in a statement Thursday. “Tragically, we have all seen majestic cities such as Chicago and San Francisco devastated by progressive leftist policies,” he said, citing more than a dozen deaths on Halloween in the city he recently abandoned, Chicago. “In a few days, I believe American voters will say we’ve suffered enough from these misguided policies.”

Beyond such well-known megadonors are billionaire contributors of far less renown. Jeff Yass, a Philadelphia-based trader who founded the Susquehanna International Group hedge fund, is hardly a household name, but his contributions of nearly $50 million made him the fourth-largest donor of the cycle.

Timothy Mellon, the quiet heir of the Mellon banking fortune, ranked fifth after writing checks worth $15 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund; a $5 million check on Sept. 15 to the Wisconsin Truth PAC, which is blistering Democrats in the state; checks totaling $6 million this fall to the Sentinel Action Fund, a new super PAC run by the Heritage Foundation’s political arm; and a $4 million check in September to the opaque American Policy Fund, which has spent more than $5 million attacking Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado.

“Is this consistent with democratic— ‘title d’— principles when you have billionaires dropping millions of dollars and they are having such an effect?” asked Kenneth Mayer, a campaign finance expert and political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. “We’re breaking records every cycle.”

The sixth-largest donor is a [conservative] Democrat who made arguably the biggest splash for his party this cycle, Samuel Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire. His $37 million in giving helped fund the Democrats’ two main super PACs, the Senate Majority Fund and the House Majority Fund, as well as the party’s official House and Senate campaign arms.

Bankman-Fried is a big phony who has admitted he’s a conservative and has tried to help elect conservative Democrats through a bogus SuperPAC, Protect Our Future, that claims to be about backing candidates who would champion pandemic protection but has nothing—as in ZERO— to do with that at all. What he has really tried to do all cycle was to prevent progressives— like Nina Turner, Erica Smith, Alan Grayson, Melanie D'Arrigo, Nida Allam, Daniel Lee, Sarah Klee Hood, Christina Garcia, Andrea Salinas— from winning nominations and to make sure that servile puppets— like Maxwell Frost in Orlando, Laura Gillen in Queens, Jared Moskowitz in Ft. Lauderdale, Shontel Brown in Cleveland and Robert Garcia in Long Beach— who would back his cryptocurrency agenda, would get into office as Democrats. Much of his spending was coordinated with AIPAC and DMFI as part of Hakeem Jeffries’ anti-progressive jihad.

Weisman and Shorey noted that “unlike Republican mega donors, “Bankman-Fried is also trying to maintain relations in both parties, giving at least $45,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and thousands more to Republican senators like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, John Boozman of Arkansas, Susan Collins of Maine and John Hoeven of North Dakota.”

For a state like Wisconsin, where two mega donors, Uihlein and Diane Hendricks of Hendricks Holding Company, are spending heavily to re-elect Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, and oust Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, voters may feel besieged by impenetrable political forces, said Eleanor Neff Powell, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.

“To be honest, I don’t think the vast majority of folks in Wisconsin are aware at all of what’s going on,” she said. “The system so opaque, it’s hard for the average voter to put all these pieces together.”

Out of Uihlein’s nearly $70 million in spending, at least $26.4 million went to the conservative Club for Growth, which has pummeled Democrats with negative advertising. Another $13 million went to the Illinois-based Restoration PAC, which has spent against Evers and Johnson’s Democratic challenger, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, as well as against Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia.

But Restoration PAC also funneled $15 million to yet another organization, Americas PAC, which then went after Barnes, Warnock and the Democratic senators Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, as well as Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania.

The multitude of money flows makes following dollars difficult. Yass appears intent on keeping it that way. More than $6 million of his money went to Club for Growth, in keeping with his past giving, but he also gave $15 million to something called the School Freedom Fund, virtually its lone source of money.

The School Freedom Fund the spent more than $1.5 million of Yass’ money to sink the Senate primary run of former Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina; $654,000 in a failed bid to secure the Republican Senate nomination for Representative Mo Brooks in Alabama; and nearly $2 million to win a House nomination in a deep-red Oklahoma district for the newcomer Josh Brecheen.

Yass also wrote a single $5 million check to the Kentucky Freedom PAC in March 2021, which then transferred that amount to another of Yass’s favorite recipients, the Protect Freedom PAC, to which he had already given $4.5 million. Much of the latter group’s money went to failed far-right candidates, but it also spent generously to defeat Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming in the Republican primary in the summer.

By shuffling money from one group to another until one of them finally spends it, candidates and donors alike have deniability for how it is used.

“Everybody can wash their hands of the nastiness,” Professor Powell said.

Some of the most incendiary ads of the campaign have cropped up in the last few days, from new groups with titles like Citizens for Sanity, a nonprofit that does not have to disclose its donors, and America First Legal, a group started by Stephen Miller, a [Nazi] former adviser to Trump, that has yet to disclose any donors.