A rare analyst to have glimpsed Hillary Clinton’s defeats against Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Marie-Christine Bonzom has covered seven presidential elections and five presidencies. At the invitation of Dutyshe occasionally puts her expert eye on the 2024 presidential campaign.
On March 28, Joe Biden performed with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton on the stage of Radio City Music Hall to raise funds from the jet set, posing with his Democratic predecessors for admirers for the sum of 100,000 $US the photo. The president-candidate raked in 26 million, a historic loot for a political event.
But Donald Trump quickly shattered this record. On April 6, he raised $50.5 million at a reception in his luxurious Florida mansion where each benefactor who wrote a check for more than $814,000 dined at the ex-president’s table.
It’s a safe bet that the 2024 presidential election will break all records in the race for money. This is because major changes that have occurred since 2008 have reinforced the overwhelming role of money in American elections.
In 2008, Obama opened a new chapter in American presidential history: he was the first candidate to renounce public financing and its constraints, raising in the private sector a then record total of 745 million.
Two years later, the Supreme Court authorized unlimited financial participation by private entities, whether for profit or not. The race for generous donors suddenly has even fewer rules and controls than before.
Fundraising turns into an obsession for campaign teams, including the candidates themselves. Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney thus admit to having spent more time in 2012 soliciting funds than meeting ordinary voters.
Upon entering the White House in January 2017, Trump completed the necessary paperwork to run for a second term in 2020, which allowed him to continue raising funds and begin the permanent campaign.
A money machine
Since 2012, all Democratic and Republican party candidates have imitated Obama by renouncing public funding. This is the case for Biden and Trump today. Seven months before the election, these two candidates that the majority of Americans reject have already amassed more than 575 million.
Biden and Trump obliterate all third-party, independent or small party candidates. The duopoly candidates will undoubtedly exceed the sums they had raised in 2020, sums already higher than those of 2016, 2012 and 2008. The money brewed by the Democratic and Republican camps has long been obscene, especially in a country with the most glaring inequalities in the Western world. Especially since most of the funds are paid by only a few hundred super-rich people.
Moreover, there is no longer any defender of a reform of the financing of electoral campaigns within the duopoly. The most fervent, Republican Senator John McCain, died in 2018. His Democratic friend Russ Feingold is no longer in Congress.
Today, Biden’s campaign co-chair, Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, is touting “our unprecedented fundraising machine.” But grains of sand can sometimes slip into the money machine that a presidential election has become.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders inaugurated a new way of financing a campaign, with private money, of course, but primarily from small donors, those who contribute $200 or less. Ditto in 2020. This Democratic senator is even the only candidate to have reversed the ratio between small and large donors in the revenue of a presidential campaign. In 2016 and 2020, small donors provided 56% of its income.
Furthermore, the dollar is not always all-powerful. Money does not guarantee election. In 2016, Trump was elected even though he raised half as much as Hillary Clinton. Today, Biden has more money than Trump, without leading in key states.
However, the role of the wealthy and large companies in elections and among elected officials remains disproportionate. Ralph Nader, a four-time third-party presidential candidate, told me: “Soon, only billionaires will be able to run for the White House!” » In 2020 alone, three billionaires ran: Trump, on the Republican side, and Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, on the Democratic side. To date, Bloomberg is the richest presidential contender. It was over 99% self-funded.
Biden, financed mainly by large donors in 2020, upped the stakes even further by becoming the first candidate in the history of presidential elections to raise more than a billion.
The cost of a campaign is so high that in 2016, Trump and Sanders, the candidates who nevertheless embodied a rebellion against the establishment, gave up presenting themselves as mavericks. “It’s too expensive,” Sanders explained.
Access and influence
In this regard, the choice of running mate made this year by independent Robert Kennedy Jr., who chose Nicole Shanahan, muse of Silicon Valley, marks a turning point: for the first time, a candidate for the House- Blanche outright names a wealthy donor as her potential vice president.
For any candidate, donor money pays for just about everything, from the campaign team to the inauguration ball if elected. In particular, it pays for internal polls ordered by the team, the search for compromising information on opponents, the armada of lawyers deployed throughout the country to challenge the slightest aspect of the electoral process, the travel of the candidate and his relatives or the advertisements with which Americans are bombarded.
At this point, and as in 2020, Biden and Trump’s biggest donors come from the same sectors of the economy: finance, insurance and real estate. Biden is also mainly financed by large law firms and lobbyists, by Big Tech and the communications sector. For Trump, the other main sources of funding are the gaming, mining and energy sectors.
In exchange for their money, large donors, individuals or companies, expect an investment return that favors the economic sector in which they operate. Certainly, rich donors, like small ones, give out of political conviction. But if the wealthy give so much, it is because they hope for two types of benefits from their candidate once elected: access and influence. Moreover, some individuals or companies give to rival candidates at the same time.
This involves having access to ministers and other members of the president-elect’s team, and even the vice president and president themselves. Big donors want this access to influence the measures adopted, abandoned or blocked by the White House and its allies in Congress. The generous donor also eyes important or prestigious positions for those around him or for himself.
Bob Biersack, a former Federal Election Commission official, told me that “wealthy donors are effectively gaining access to the highest levels of government.” “What the superrich buy with their donations is the reflection of their point of view in the thinking of the executive, once their candidate is elected,” he told me.
Last March, Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic senator who became an independent, died accidentally without being able to form the national unity ticket that his centrist movement, No Labels, hoped to oppose to Biden and Trump. Lieberman, author of a damning report on abuses in the financing of the 1996 presidential election, was, with McCain and Feingold, one of the rare defenders of a reform aimed at cleaning up the links between politics and private money. “Big donors exert disproportionate influence over our political system,” Lieberman lamented, before adding: “They have bought a large part of American democracy. »