I haven’t voted in years. I told you that back in September, and I told you why: I couldn’t put my name next to either name on the ballot. This year I’ve been looking again.
So I’ve been paying attention. And I want to talk about money, because the loudest argument of this election isn’t about a candidate. It’s about who’s paying for them.
If you watch the news on one side, you have heard the name Elon Musk a great deal this fall.
Here are the numbers, as reported. Since July alone, Musk has put at least $276 million into Republican groups and his own super PAC. About $158 million of that went to a single group working to keep the Senate Republican. Counting the whole cycle, federal filings now put his total at about $446 million. That is more than any single donor has put into a federal election cycle since at least 2010.
That is a staggering amount of money from one man. And the Democrats have said so, loudly. Their argument, more or less: Republicans are trying to buy the election with one man’s checkbook instead of running better candidates.
They have a point. One person putting nearly half a billion dollars into an election is a problem.
Now change the channel.
For the better part of two decades, the other side has had its own villain: George Soros. To a lot of conservatives, his name stands for every unseen hand behind every progressive cause. Some of what gets said about him is fair criticism of a man who spends heavily to get what he wants. Some of it is just ugly. Either way, the name works the same way on that side that Musk’s name works on this one.
And here are those numbers. According to federal filings as of midyear, the Soros family had put roughly $103 million into this year’s midterms, mostly through a super PAC called Democracy PAC, now led by his son Alex. That put them on pace to beat their own record from 2022, when George Soros gave $128 million.
Do you hear the Democrats crying foul about that?
You don’t. Because it’s their billionaire.
I want to be careful here, because this is where most people stop thinking and pick a jersey.
Musk is spending more than Soros this cycle. That’s true. But “my billionaire spends less than your billionaire” is not a principle. It’s a scoreboard.
Here is the principle. Either it’s a problem when one very rich man pours a fortune into an election, or it isn’t. It can’t be a threat to democracy when he does it and civic engagement when our guy does it.
And it works the other direction too. If you’re a Republican who spent years telling everyone Soros was buying the country, you don’t get to cheer when Musk writes a bigger check. Same act. Same problem. Different jersey.
Almost every politician in Washington holds exactly half of that sentence. They’ll tell you, sincerely, that the other side’s billionaire is corrupting the system. Then they cash the check from their own and call it support.
None of this is illegal. That’s the part that should bother you most.
In 2010, the Supreme Court decided a case called Citizens United, and a lower court followed close behind. Between them, they opened the door to what we now call super PACs: groups that can raise and spend unlimited money on elections, as long as they don’t coordinate directly with a candidate.
That’s the rule both billionaires are playing by. Unlimited, mostly in the open, and legal. The wink-and-nod “no coordinating” line is about as solid as it sounds.
You can argue the Court got it right. The case was about free speech, and spending money to say something is a kind of speech. You can argue it got it badly wrong. Reasonable people have been arguing it for sixteen years. But whichever way you land, you have to land there for both men. You don’t get a free-speech principle that only covers the billionaires you like.
Here’s what actually worries me, and it isn’t either of these two men in particular.
When a few people can put hundreds of millions into an election, the candidates learn something. They learn who really pays for the race. And it isn’t you.
You and I might send a candidate fifty dollars. A super PAC can drop ten million on one Senate seat in a month. When that senator gets to Washington and has to choose between what you need and what the man with the ten million wants, I’d like to believe he picks you. I wouldn’t count on it.
That’s not a left problem or a right problem. It’s an “everyone who doesn’t have a billion dollars” problem, which is nearly all of us.
I’ll tell you what would make me take one of these candidates seriously.
Not the other side’s billionaire is evil. I’ve heard that. From both of them.
I’d like to hear a candidate say: I think unlimited money in elections is bad, and that includes the money spent on me. Then turn some of it down. Push for real limits, even if that means a constitutional amendment, which it probably does. Or at least demand that every dollar be disclosed, fast and in plain sight, so voters can see who’s paying for what before they vote and not months after.
Until then, when someone tells you the other team is being bought, ask them one question.
What about the billionaire you like?
