How did political campaigns get so expensive?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

NPR.

Maria Aspan (0:06)

Next month's midterm elections could be the most expensive in history. Billionaires are largely to blame.

Wailin Wong (0:12)

I saw this week that Elon Musk told The New York Times he's given Republican groups almost $300 million since July.

Maria Aspan (0:19)

I guess that buys a lot of attack ads. But Republicans already had a big spending advantage. By some estimates, they've raised almost twice as much as Democrats for the midterms.

And yet, despite all this money, things aren't looking good for the Republicans. If you trust the polls, of course.

Wailin Wong (0:35)

Right. But also prediction markets like Cal-Shee and Polymarket, they think the Democrats are going to win.

Maria Aspan (0:41)

This wouldn't be the first time that money doesn't win big. Case in point, Vice President Kamala Harris far outspent President Trump two years ago. And well, we know how that turned out.

Wailin Wong (0:53)

Are you saying billionaires can't actually buy elections?

Maria Aspan (0:56)

Shockingly, it does seem like their money can't actually buy everything. But that's still not stopping people or corporations from spending more and more of it on US politics.

Wailin Wong (1:09)

This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong, joined by journalist and friend of the show Maria Aspin. Welcome back to The Indicator, Maria.

Maria Aspan (1:17)

Thank you, Waylon. It's great to be here. And over the next three weeks, I'll be joining you to look into how money is shaping next month's midterms. Today, money doesn't always win elections, so what else does it do?

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Maria Aspan (2:59)

Adam Bonica has spent more than 15 years digging into the data of how money shapes US elections. He's a political science professor at Stanford, and he says that this is a pretty negative part of American exceptionalism.

Adam Bonica (3:13)

It's pretty rare for established democracies to have money in the political system be, A, this important, and B, this pervasive, and C, for our politicians to be so obsessed about it.

Maria Aspan (3:30)

So how did we get here? A lot started with Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that erased the limits on independent corporate spending in elections.

But Adam says the problems began way earlier, like decades earlier.

Adam Bonica (3:45)

It's hard not to look at Buckley v. Vallejo, which was a Supreme Court decision that was decided in the 1970s that had set out the legal precedent that money is more or less equivalent to speech. That has allowed wealthy individuals to basically be able to give as much as they want into the system.

Wailin Wong (4:10)

Adam is not alone in blaming the Supreme Court. Trevor Potter is a Republican and the former head of the Federal Election Commission. He points out that none of the current Supreme Court justices have ever run for public office. And he says that's part of a bigger problem.

Trevor Potter (4:25)

It's been a combination of a Supreme Court, which I think increasingly doesn't understand how elections work, and a commission which does not enforce existing laws, and a deadlocked Congress that has been unable to change the laws and clarify them. So all of those together has resulted in a kind of wild west of non-disclosure and enormous sums being spent in elections.

Maria Aspan (4:57)

Today, Trevor runs a non-partisan non-profit called the Campaign Legal Center. But in the early 2000s, he advised the late Republican Senator John McCain on his two presidential campaigns, including when he ran in 2008 against then Senator Barack Obama.