Cleaning up America’s polluted campaign finance ecosystem just got a lot harder

This is an adapted excerpt from the June 30 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”

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In the 2024 elections, $9.5 billion was spent on congressional races, and $5.3 billion on the presidential race, for a total of $14.8 billion on federal political campaigns, according to data compiled by Open Secrets. 

That makes 2024 the second-most expensive election cycle in history, second only to the 2020 election figure of $18.7 billion.

Of that $14.8 billion, an estimated $1.9 billion came from so called “dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors,” a figure that nearly doubled from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 

One man, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ardent backer of far-right causes, spent more than $291 million in the 2024 elections, an analysis by Open Secrets found. That made him the biggest individual political donor in the entire 2024 election cycle. 

In this election cycle, Musk has poured another $85 million into groups supporting Republicans running in the midterms, per The Washington Post.

This is not the way the system is supposed to work. Or is it?

A majority of Americans don’t seem to think so. Seventy-two percent say there is too much money in politics, according to recent polling from Politico. That many Americans usually don’t agree on much of anything.

But too much money in politics is there by design. Campaign finance laws allow outside groups to pour vast sums into elections. 

And here’s the thing: It’s a really bad return on the investment. The U.S. stands alone among our peer nations. According to The Wall Street Journal, Canada’s 2021 federal election saw spending of “$69 million in today’s dollars—about 1/27th the price tag per voter south of the border. U.S. elections cost about 40 times more per person than the U.K. or Germany.”

Now, in fairness, Canada’s population is about one-tenth the size of that of America. But multiply the $69 million by 10, and you still aren’t at $1 billion, let alone $15 billion. 

This has been an escalating issue in American politics for the past half century. In 1976, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that declared most campaign spending limits unconstitutional. In 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the problem was supercharged. With that decision, the Supreme Court opened the door for corporations and other groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.