Election ballots helpfully inform voters who is a Republican and who is a Democrat. Our campaign finance system is now so corrupt that we may soon have to add “Sponsored by A.I.” or “Sponsored by crypto.”
The baleful influence of moneyed interests on politics has been with us for so long that we forget how much it can distort policy-making. Now we face midterm elections in which two important debates — how to shape the future of artificial intelligence and what role cryptocurrency should play in our economy — are in danger of being dominated by big-dollar offensives from new industries with lots of resources.
They won’t be the only big spenders in 2026, of course, but they deserve particular scrutiny because the regulation of both is in its early stages and they already enjoy the favor of a White House where money talks loudly. A.I. and crypto will inevitably have a place at tables where decisions about them are made. But they shouldn’t own the tables.
Even when candidates supported by the big spenders lose, their expenditures send a message about how much tribulation they can inflict on those who oppose them. And a few major wins can have an intimidating effect.
This was the case in 2024 when the crypto industry moved aggressively against the Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, then a senator who had survived three tough campaigns over 18 years. As the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Mr. Brown had called for strict oversight of crypto. The industry was not happy, and in the weeks immediately before the election, a crypto-backed super PAC ran $40 million in ads against him, and for his Republican opponent, who is now Senator Bernie Moreno.
Yes, Mr. Brown lost in the Trump tide in Ohio, but crypto helped his exit along. Although Mr. Brown has launched a comeback effort this year, and has a decent shot at winning, the industry’s role in his 2024 defeat was certainly noticed by his colleagues.
Last week’s Democratic primary in Illinois was instructive in many ways — and not because the big interests won across the board. A.I., crypto and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, had at best a mixed record. We shouldn’t take too much heart from that. “That’s not symbolic of a healthy democracy,” Celina Stewart, the chief executive of the League of Women Voters, told me. “It’s a stress test, and we barely passed.” The contests showed how hard interest groups play in primaries, particularly in states where one party (in Illinois’s case, the Democrats) is heavily favored.
As Shane Goldmacher reported in The Times, crypto groups spent $10 million in the Democratic Senate primary, supporting Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi. He lost to Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton. Ms. Stratton was able to withstand the onslaught in part because of the help she got from another big spender — Gov. JB Pritzker, another Democrat, whose super PAC spent $12 million on Ms. Stratton’s behalf. It’s a strange system that creates a need for heavy-spending billionaire political friends — one in which there is “far more money floating around from people with a direct interest in government policy than we’ve ever had before,” as the veteran reformer Fred Wertheimer, president of the nonprofit group Democracy 21, put it to me.
Illinois was illustrative in another way: It showed how much political pain can be inflicted on legislators who advocate regulation at the state level when they seek higher office. State Representative La Shawn Ford, who had supported state legislation regulating both the A.I. and crypto industries, had to fight $2.5 million spent by Fairshake, a crypto-backed PAC. Mr. Ford prevailed, but in another race, the crypto crowd dropped $800,000 against State Senator Robert Peters, another pro-regulation candidate, and helped drive him into third place.
That contest was something of a campaign finance gumbo of clashing interests, as Matt Brown of The Associated Press reported. One A.I. coalition opposed to all federal regulation backed former Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., while another, favoring moderate regulation, supported Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, who won.
One other insidious thing about these groups: Their ads (and often their identities) are typically not transparent as to their policy goals. Many of the interest group ads, Adam Green of the left-leaning Progressive Change Campaign Committee wrote in the New Republic, portrayed “corporate-backed candidates as fighters against billionaire power, Wall Street banks, health insurance abuses and even ICE.”
The issue here is not the right of industry groups to defend their interests. It’s the radical imbalance created by concentrated money. “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard,” former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his 2014 dissent in McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission, meaning that “a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point.”
This points to the wisdom of the legendary political scientist Robert Dahl’s observation about the “paradox” of capitalism: It can help promote democracy by making sure that government does not control all the means of expression, but it also creates large problems for democracy, because of the unequal access to power that it can lead to.
This is why the conservative Supreme Court majority’s decisions opening the way for money to rule are so destructive. In McCutcheon, it struck down limits on the total an individual could contribute to candidates and political committees in an election cycle. In Citizens United in 2010, it invalidated campaign restrictions on corporations, unions and other nonprofit groups.
These changes in law, along with growing inequality, have opened an age of billionaire political barons. A recent New York Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members (out of our population of roughly 340 million) gave 19 percent of all contributions — more than $3 billion — in the 2024 federal elections, either directly or through PACs.
We’ve been here before, and we’ve acted. After the first Gilded Age, reformers in the Progressive Era took important steps to limit money’s writ. Reform triumphed again in the 1970s after the corruption revealed during Watergate. It’s this generation’s turn at reform, beginning with broad and effective disclosure requirements and matching funds for small contributions to democratize political finance and make clean money an option for those seeking office.
In the meantime, it’s heartening that journalists are paying attention to what crypto and A.I. interest groups are up to. The debate over these industries must not be fixed by those with the money to bully elected officials who should be holding them accountable.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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