Dark Money Midterms

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian today. Coming up on today's show, we're going to take a trip to the Bronx to talk about what it means when a borough of almost 1.5 million people is on its way to becoming a news desert. Just this week, another community news outlet, the Norwood News, announced it is closing up shop. My guest, Eileen Markey, is a longtime journalist and professor at Lehman College. She'll give us her thoughts on what this means for the Bronx.
Plus, video games, not a topic you hear discussed on The Brian Lehrer Show all that often, yet it is a huge part of the entertainment economy. We'll talk today about the shift from physical media towards subscription payment models, and what that means for consumers and the future of the quarter-billion-dollar video game industry. And we'll have a very special guest at the end of today's show, our colleague Jeff Spurgeon, who is retiring as the morning show host on WQXR after 30 years on the air.
But first, dark money in the midterm elections.
When you see a political ad on TV or you get a direct mailer or you watch an influencer on your phone talking about a local race, do you know who paid for it? Most of the time, that money is untraceable. Big donors have ways to hide their names when they're spending millions to influence elections. For example, a donor might funnel cash through a nonprofit group that funds a super PAC. Now, the super PAC is legally required to list its donors, but the nonprofit isn't. So when you look at the public records, you only see the name of the nonprofit, not the actual person who wrote the check. Or a brand new super PAC could exploit campaign finance loopholes to raise funds during a very narrow window right before an election. Because of the way filing deadlines work, their names won't be made public until after the votes are already counted. That's examples of dark money. According to my next guest, at least $1 billion in anonymous money is flowing in elections across the country this cycle. It's making the midterms less transparent, and it may just be a sneak preview of what's to come in 2028 We're joined by Theodore Schleifer from the New York Times, who covers billionaires and their impact on the world, and whose recent article along with his colleague Shane Goldmacher is titled Millions of dollars in secret spending could upend the 2026 midterms. Teddy, hi, welcome to WNYC.

**Theodore Schleifer** (2:42)
Thanks for having me.

**Kusha Navadar** (2:43)
I want to paint a picture to help everyone visualize what's going on. So your article goes through a bunch of case studies where dark money is showing up. There was a House and Senate race in Maine, another Senate race in Michigan.
I was wondering, could we open just with an anecdote that you particularly like to demonstrate what dark money is and its impact?

**Theodore Schleifer** (3:04)
Sure. I mean, I think a lot of people here may have been following the Michigan Senate race where Hailey Stevens, the Democratic nominee, or the hopeful, Democratic hopeful was in a pretty nasty contest with Abdul Al-Sayed who ended up becoming the Democratic nominee. Hailey Stevens was supported by $60 million in outside spending from I think about a half dozen outside groups. Every single one of those groups, all six of them had serious connections to dark money. And by that, I mean, they either were non-profits themselves that don't disclose their donors, or they were heavily funded by non-profits, or they were groups that started a few minutes before, not really, but it can feel like minutes before the election even happened. So the Super PAC wouldn't file any donors or disclose any donors until after election day. That race, the money really became an issue in it. And I think that's happening more and more where it's not just a, oh, the dark money is helping my opponent, but it becomes an animating issue in the election itself. Abdul Al Sayed made a huge deal out of Stevens' support from these undisclosed donors. And that I think is the future, at least in democratic politics, is how people raise their money.
It's a double edged sword. I mean, sometimes it helps to have outside cash, but the dark money can be used against you.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:27)
So you're saying that it's an animating issue specifically because it brings into question, why do you need to use money that is donated in shade? I'm not going to say shady, but in less than transparent ways. Is that a fair-