Two weeks from now, the midterm elections will deliver an explosion of narrative meaning: about the country and its future, the president and his movement and his legacy. But the election cycle has already taught us a couple of very important things about money’s place in our democracy. One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.
Let’s take the first point. This election will be the most expensive in history, with more money projected to be spent on political advertisements than even during the presidential campaign of two years ago. And though President Trump’s popularity is at historic lows and the Republican Party regularly registers tsunami-scale deficits in polling, Republicans are actually leading in the overall spending race. How? According to calculations by The Washington Post, the four biggest donors this cycle (including groups, nonprofits and firms) have given to Republicans, as have seven of the top ten. The single largest donor, Elon Musk, has donated 3.6 times as much money as the biggest Democratic donor, George Soros, and is almost single-handedly bankrolling Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate race in Texas against James Talarico, as my colleague Teddy Schleifer reported last week.
In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.
The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.
This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.
Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.
Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.
It’s true, as it is across the Western world, that globalization and educational polarization have tended to pull cosmopolitan elites leftward over the past several decades. But this is much more about education than class, and the shifts have not been all that dramatic lately; perhaps we have even reached a kind of new equilibrium. Between 2012 and 2024, Democrats improved their performance among college graduates by only 2 percentage points. Last election cycle, Kamala Harris won more votes from Americans making over $100,000 than did Trump, but only by a margin of 51 to 47 percent. A certain kind of well-educated meritocrat is probably more likely to vote Democratic now than a few decades ago. But as Owen Zidar and Eric Swick document meticulously, a shocking amount of American wealth is held by “everywhere millionaires” — beverage distributors, HVAC contractors, car dealers and dentists — who still lean Republican. And if Trump’s second term has achieved nothing else, it has made MAGA look much more like the revolt of billionaires than the howl of the left behind it seemed to be in 2016.
In between, Americans heard a lot about how the Democratic Party was the party of elites. This was always a bit of a strange idea, given the policy preferences of the two parties and the fact that only a small fraction of Americans — including Trump voters — actually identified college professors, journalists and nonprofit professionals as elites. In 2024, Americans thought Democrats more than Republicans were the party of the working class, understood “the problems facing people like me” and could fix those problems — though by pretty slim margins. And just a couple of years ago, as I watched Democrats respond to Trump’s re-election by focusing on affordability and the cost of living, I wondered whether the electorate would buy their pitch — or whether its reputation as the party of the well-educated, professional managerial class would mean appeals to the struggles of working people would ring hollow.
As it happened, they didn’t have to do much persuading; Trump did it for them. According to one poll, political corruption is now the political issue most important to American voters. According to another, Americans trust Democrats more on the economy by a margin of 51 to 37 percent — an enormous gap that is also, incredibly, the first time Republicans haven’t held a major advantage on that question since 2012. When asked last week which party represented the working class, 53 percent of Americans picked Democrats, while 40 percent chose Republicans.
One feature of our political era is that few realignments really seem to last, with elections in many countries seeming to promise generational change on the scale of the Reagan or Thatcher earthquakes only to fizzle out instead under the pressure of structural resentments. In many cases, it may be wiser not to attribute much ideological meaning to these whiplash results, but to see them instead as what the podcaster Alex Hochuli called a “disgusted roll of the dice.”
But I do think it’s likely — whether voters stick with Democrats or not — that the party itself has been reshaped by the experience of the second Trump term in ways that make that stereotype of being the party of money even harder to credit.
First, there has been the grotesque and unapologetic nature of the conservative grift, which pulls the contrast with liberals into sharp relief.
Second, A.I. hasn’t yet remade the American economy all that radically, but it has become the central story around which all economic discourse circles, and though Democrats have yet to develop a coherent positioning on A.I., it’s strikingly clear that the nakedly pro-A.I., pro-data-center posture of so much of the MAGA coalition is a political loser. (In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the rightward swing of tech oligarchs in 2024 came in anticipation of these fights, and perhaps it’s an irony that A.I. backlash could help return concerned Democrats to positions of regulatory power and oversight.)
Third is the changing face of the Democratic Party. Shortly after the presidential election, the two likeliest standard-bearers in 2028 seemed to be Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. Now the field is full of Jon Ossoffs and A.O.C.s. The new class of Democratic senators may include Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson. Rob Sand may become the governor of Iowa and Amy Acton the governor of Ohio. Not all of these figures are left wing — the most impressive campaign this cycle may be Josh Shapiro’s romp to re-election in Pennsylvania. But many of these Democrats have spent 2026 campaigning quite explicitly about the new American plutocracy. “It’s the most corrupt administration of all time,” Ossoff has taken to saying in Georgia. “The crook president and his crook family rake in billions from all over the world. You pay more for everything.”
This is another way in which MAGA corruption has been a political gift to Democrats, allowing even the centrists among them to talk about economic injustice without needing to use the language of class warfare. Perhaps stranger, it’s helped make talk about plutocracy into an unlikely binding agent between the otherwise pretty hostile center and left wings of the party.
And the critique has proved impervious to that fire hose of Republican spending, which conservatives had long assumed would be a secret weapon in the homestretch. Squint and you can see a little tightening in Texas, perhaps, but that’s about it. In many ways, it’s foolish to put too much narrative stock into polls: We’ll have real results soon enough. But the likeliest outcome — a blowout for Democrats — is also likely to leave plenty of Republican megadonors wondering what they spent all their millions on. And why they ever felt so sure they could buy themselves a permanent MAGA majority.
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