Follow the money. Journalists — not to mention anyone who has seen the movie “All the President’s Men” — know the phrase well. By tracking the money, reporters can better understand and convey the forces shaping society.
That was the approach taken by Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer of The New York Times, who recently reported that at least $1 billion in dark money — funds from anonymous donors — is flowing into midterm elections.
So how do you find something obscured by design?
To answer that question and others, Schleifer and Amy Gardner, a deputy editor on the Politics desk, took time before the final stretch of midterm races to discuss why dark money matters and how they tracked it. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Let’s start with a couple of broad questions: What does money buy in politics? And is there anything it can’t buy?
THEODORE SCHLEIFER: I’ve been writing about money in politics for over a decade now, and I’ve written some stories that have proven to be clunkers. I sometimes cringe reading my pieces from during the 2016 campaign that made it seem like Donald Trump had no chance of competing with Hillary Clinton because she was out-raising him month after month.
So my understanding of how much the money matters has evolved. You’d rather have more money than less, but candidates can win with sometimes substantially less — or make the fact that their opponent has more into something of a political liability, especially if the funding is from a controversial place.
AMY GARDNER: This is such an important question and one we’re not done trying to answer this cycle. I’m very eager to show readers in more detail where voters are getting their information about campaigns, because the answer is evolving rapidly. Influencers, social media, online ads — coupled with younger voters who don’t watch traditional TV — raise all kinds of questions about whether the billions of dollars being spent putting ads on the airwaves are actually buying the same influence that they used to.
On the second question, one thing money cannot buy: a good candidate.
What is dark money, and how has it come to dominate modern campaigns?
THEODORE: I love this question, because the term has been totally warped by partisans over the last few years to signify “scary thing I don’t like.” (No, it does not mean all super PACs, those canonical outside groups that can raise unlimited money.) There is some debate among reasonable people about edge cases, but generally it refers to donations or spending by entities that do not disclose their donors, which are usually nonprofits. The term “dark money” can be read as a bit sinister, but to me it just carries this more technical definition.
There was dark-money spending before the landmark Citizens United decision in 2010 that loosened campaign finance rules, but quite a bit more after. There’s more advertising and spending by these dark-money groups, and some of them are spun into an intricate web with one another. You’ll sometimes see one dark-money group pass millions onto another, which passes it onto another, and another and another, and then finally that dough ends up funding the mailer at your doorstep. Good luck tracing all of it.
When contributions are hidden, how do you even know to look for them?
THEODORE: Nonprofit donors are almost always not public. But nonprofit spending generally is, and that’s how as a reporter you can peek behind the curtain.
When a nonprofit sends that piece of mail, there’s a disclosure saying what group paid for it. When they run an ad on television, the ad and payment can be tracked by media-buying firms who pull public records showing the amount and locations of the buy. And when a nonprofit makes a donation to a super PAC, the contribution is recorded in paperwork with the Federal Election Commission.
That being said, we’re just scratching the surface. I absolutely believe there are major nonprofits creating influential or provocative content in the midterms that have evaded detection. These groups will file a tax return, probably at the end of 2027, at which point the election is well over and I feel like I will be the only person in America who volunteers to read the filing. (OK, I am paid to.)
Dark money has reached “industrial scale,” as you reported. With such a vast investigative target, where do you begin your research?
THEODORE: This story began for Shane and I with a feeling, more or less. We’ve both written about campaign finance for a long time, and yet we felt like it was easier than ever to get away with not disclosing your donors. That was our intangible sense from just living in the world of sources and documents that we do.
That’s not a story, though. We then began a pretty extensive research effort to assess whether that feeling was true. It was. Feelings are really meaningful as reporters, and we try to trust them.
AMY: It can be challenging to show the reader what’s new or noteworthy about a subject that is as complex as campaign finance, and dark money in particular. We don’t know the full universe of how much dark money is being spent, so we can’t say, for instance, it’s more than ever this year. We don’t know that! But we can say what we’re seeing that we haven’t seen before. We’re seeing an enormous total just from the sources that are traceable. And we’re seeing this money infuse far more races, in both primaries and general elections.
One reason we put an explanation of Teddy’s and Shane’s methodology at the bottom of the story was to help readers understand where they got their data, and ideally to impart that we are telling the reader what we were able to find, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more out there.
How does this kind of fund-raising work? Can and do campaigns coordinate with outside groups behind some of these large contributions?
THEODORE: Candidates mostly can’t coordinate with these outside groups, but there are some exceptions, and ones that operatives in private conversations tell me they are increasingly comfortable testing. For instance, we report that Senator Susan Collins of Maine attended a dinner thrown for her in July by Stronger America, a nonprofit group that is aligned with her. Collins, a Republican, obviously knows who was at the dinner — but the public doesn’t, because Stronger America doesn’t disclose its donors.
How does dark money shape campaigns?
AMY: One area of interest for me is the extent to which such vast sums of money increase the income of political operatives, who in some cases get a cut of ad purchases. That creates an incentive in the industry to continue the money race even as new, cheaper ways to reach voters emerge, such as social media influencing or online ads.
What are you watching for next in this area of politics?
AMY: I’m curious whether changes in the way people learn about candidates will change the way campaigns and outside groups spend their money. That certainly doesn’t appear to be happening yet. As Teddy and Shane noted in their story, Republicans and Democrats alike keep coming up with new ways to raise and hide money.
THEODORE: I expect this trend to go into overdrive in the 2028 presidential cycle. I think it will become the norm for super PACs to be funded just by an alphabet soup of patriotic-sounding nonprofits, all created in disclosure-hostile states like Delaware or Wyoming about five minutes before they make billion-dollar donations to super PACs. I am only kind of kidding.
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