Chapter 1: What is the impact of unlimited spending in elections?
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You already know the person who spent the most money supporting President Trump's campaign in 2024. His name is Elon Musk. You might remember him showing up at Trump rallies. Come on up here, Elad. Jumping awkwardly around on stage.
Take over, Elad, yes, take over.
But behind the scenes, he'd spend more than $291 million to support President Trump's win. And we had one president who couldn't climb a flight of stairs. And another who was fist-pumping after getting shot.
Shortly after the election, Musk was tapped by Trump to lead Doge, which would slash government spending and jobs, which he represented once by pretending to fire up a chainsaw at the conservative CPAC convention.
This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!
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Chapter 2: Who are the major players influencing campaign finance today?
Musk was the biggest spender by far. But he wasn't the only billionaire trying to influence the elections. About $15 billion was spent in 2024. And what raised eyebrows was the relatively short list of the ultra-rich people who spent it.
Some major donors and billionaires have made public pushes for candidates this election cycle. So when it comes to following the money, there is a whole lot of it to keep track of in this race.
Several high profile billionaires are dumping massive amounts of money into the presidential race. Fast forward to today. The 2026 midterm elections are already shaping up to be the most costly in American history, part of a trend over the last several decades where the amount of money spent on elections has mostly been going up.
So we wanted to look at one moment, a big moment, that seemed to open the financial floodgates.
I am. I'm tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic.
In the lead up to the 2008 presidential election, it looked like at the time that Hillary was the front runner for the Democratic nomination. This is Michael King. He's a law professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Citizens United wanted to run a documentary that told all kinds of stories that they felt were important to tell about Hillary Clinton.
You might have heard of Citizens United, the plaintiff ever since its 2010 Supreme Court case. But Citizens United had for years been a conservative nonprofit that made media supporting Republicans and critical of Democrats. And their film, Hillary the Movie, had a strong narrative. Generally that she was kind of an awful person. She's driven by the power. Would be a terrible candidate.
She does not answer questions. Disaster in all kinds of ways. She is the expert of not saying what she believes. So they produced this documentary. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Could she become the first female president in the history of the United States? It wasn't designed to make a lot of money. It was designed to be seen. And they wanted to distribute that movie through video on demand.
Their goal at the outset was not to change campaign finance law. They just wanted to be able to show their movie. Citizens United wanted to run their movie on cable TV and air ads for it on broadcast TV close to the 2008 presidential primary election. But the Federal Elections Commission opposed them. Laws banned these kinds of political ads from running 30 days before the primaries.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the Citizens United case?
I'm Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media. Want to understand the reasons and the meanings of the narratives that led us here and maybe how to head them off at the pass? That's On the Media's specialty. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Part 1. Cat and Mouse. In 1971, there was a rush of money heading to Washington, D.C. Literally, and infamously, suitcases full of cash all going to support the re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon.
For four years, President Nixon has responded to the needs of the people. That's why we need President Nixon, now more than ever.
By the 70s, it had become expensive to run political campaigns. Television had become popular and running ads on TV cost a lot of money. But getting in front of a mass audience was a must for politicians. At the same time, Congress passed its first major campaign finance bill called the Federal Election Campaign Act, or FICA.
FICA capped campaign contributions and spending for things like ads, and also forced candidates to disclose the names of anyone donating over $100. In the weeks before the law took effect, Nixon's campaign would raise millions of dollars from secret donors. In the end, Nixon's campaign was forced to turn over his donors list.
And when they did, volunteers from a group called Common Cause started connecting the dots between corporate donors on his list and political favors that Nixon seemed to be doling out. The former head of American Airlines and the current chief of Goodyear Tire and Rubber told the Irvin Committee how they gave $55,000 and $40,000 respectively to the Nixon re-election committee.
Both contributions were illegal. There's actually not a lot of campaign finance regulation before the 1970s at the federal level. Really very lax enforcement of whatever campaign finance laws we had at the time.
The first major campaign finance law passed in the United States was the Tillman Act in 1907, when Teddy Roosevelt was accused of accepting large corporate donations for his presidential run in exchange for political favors. The Tillman Act prevented corporations from making direct contributions to influence federal elections.
And for most of the 20th century, corporate spending was seen in both law and culture as a potentially corrupting force in elections. Eventually, unions were also limited for making candidate contributions. But it wouldn't be until after Watergate and amendments to FICA that experts say real reforms were put in place.
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Chapter 4: How did campaign finance laws evolve in the 20th century?
One is they apply contribution limits across the board for everyone. So anytime you're exchanging money in the campaign finance system, there's a limit on how much you can give. FICA put limits on how much individuals could give to candidates, how much they could give to political parties, and how much parties could also give to candidates.
So if you wanted to give to a candidate, you had a limit of $1,000. If you want to give to a party, there's a limit. If a party wanted to give to a candidate, there was a limit. It also had disclosure rules. So that meant every time a candidate receives money above a certain amount, they have to disclose it. Every time they spend money in a significant way, they have to disclose that.
And anyone who's really active in federal campaign finance politics has to register. And then, in addition, there were expenditure limits, which meant that candidates could only spend so much. So as a candidate, you don't have to worry about your competitor outspending you because you were both capped.
The next year, in 1975, a group of libertarian and conservative politicians filed a lawsuit arguing that fundraising and spending limits made it harder for newcomers to run against favored incumbents. The case is known as Buckley v. Vallejo.
Counsel, you may proceed whenever you're ready.
James Buckley is a conservative politician. He was a former U.S. senator. He is one of a bunch of politicians that challenges the FICA amendments, the whole campaign finance system under the First Amendment. Buckley argued that limiting the amount of money campaigns can raise and spend limited what those campaigns could say to potential voters.
To Buckley and others, money was speech, and the First Amendment guarantees that right to free speech.
The greatest campaign reform law ever enacted was the First Amendment. We rely on the proposition that good speech will drive out bad. And all opponents ask is that the court enforce that.
On the government side, attorneys argued that the caps on spending were justified in order to prevent corruption rather than to censor speech. So what is the ruling that comes out of this case today? And how does it sort of play out over the next several decades? One is it says campaign finance is First Amendment activity and it's protected by the First Amendment.
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Chapter 5: What role do super PACs play in modern elections?
In other words, the Supreme Court wanted to take on a much bigger question, one that had already been settled by decades of legal precedent. Could the government really ban corporate spending on elections? Did the free speech under the First Amendment right extend to corporations like it did to individual people? Later that year, 2009, the case came back to the Supreme Court.
By this time, Barack Obama had become president after massively outspending John McCain with unprecedented help from private donors. So when Citizens United goes back to the Supreme Court the second time for re-argument, it's a pretty momentous oral argument. It's Elena Kagan's first argument as Solicitor General.
Everyone knows that basically the future of the campaign finance system is on the line. And we're not surprised when Citizens United wins the case, ultimately, because at the argument, Kagan goes in and essentially is trying to limit the loss.
If you're asking me, Mr. Chief Justice, as to whether the government has a preference as to the way in which it loses, if it has to lose...
What case of ours? What case of ours? If we lose this case, we do have a preference on how we lose this case. We don't want to lose this case so badly that we lose all campaign finance regulation. So it's no surprise when the government loses. But it is pretty dramatic.
Today, the Supreme Court struck down federal legislation that restricts how corporations can spend their money in political campaigns.
The 5-4 majority, led by Justice Kennedy, said that political speech is at the heart of the First Amendment. And the identity of the speaker does not remove that protection. Whether it's an individual or a group of individuals, maybe who work for a corporation, if they want to spend their money on getting their message out, they can't.
So they rejected the idea that corporate wealth creates a special corruption risk that justifies a ban. These restrictions on corporate spending have been around since 1907. The Tillman Act of 1907, the United States' first law to ban corporate spending in elections. And now we've blown a huge hole in campaign finance law.
And the worry along these lines is that the floodgates will open to corporate money. And that's really where all the attention is. The Supreme Court has said... like people, corporations have the right to engage in political advocacy and expenditures without restriction. That had always been a critical distinction.
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Chapter 6: How do super PACs influence local elections differently?
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