In an era when just about every
major Republican and Democratic presidential aspirant has a campaign sugar
daddy, the role of big money in politics has never been more crucial.
As The Washington Post
noted this week, “Never have so many candidates entered a White House contest
boosted by such huge sums.”
Sure, former Florida governor Jeb
Bush boasted raising tens of millions of dollars for his allied super
PAC. That hasn’t been nearly enough to thwart Sens. Marco Rubio of
Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas or Wisconsin Gov. Scott
Walker from raising comparable sums to propel their campaigns.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s
2010 Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to independent
expenditures for campaign, candidates for president and Congress have been
raising record sums. But where is that money actually coming from?
In the 2014 elections, 31,976 donors
— equal to about one percent of one percent of the total population of the
United States – accounted for an astounding $1.18 billion in disclosed
political contributions at the federal level, according to a new report by the Center
for Responsive Politics and the Sunshine Foundation, two non-partisan campaign spending watchdogs.
“Those big givers — what we have
termed the Political One Percent of the One Percent — have a massively outsized
impact on federal campaigns,” according to the report.
A profile of this highly elite group
of political kingmakers shows, among other things:
- They’re mostly male, they tend to be city-dwellers and often work in finance.
- Slightly more of them skew Republican than Democratic.
- A small subset — barely five dozen — gave more than $1 million each. And a minute cluster of three individuals contributed more than $10 million apiece.
- The $1.18 billion they contributed represents 29 percent of all fundraising that political committees disclosed to the Federal Election Commission in 2014.
- Though both parties depend on these donors, the GOP received more from them than Democrats.
Not surprisingly, Wall Street
continues as the most influential sector among the One Percent of the One
Percent, both in the number of donors that made the list and the money given.
Contributors who listed employment in the securities industry spent about
$175 million in 2014, of which $107.5 million went to committees supporting
Republicans.
The top three financial benefactors
in 2014 each contributed more than $10 million. Heading that list was Tom
Steyer, the liberal San Francisco hedge fund manager and environmentalist who
accounted for $73 million alone. The vast majority of that money went to super
Democratic PACs targeting GOP candidates.
Steyer was followed by former New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a political independent, with $28.4 million and
New York financier Paul Singer, a Republican, with $11.2 million.
“The donors at the very top of the money
pyramid provided the financial fuel for many of the attack ads and other
messages from independent organizations that filled the airwaves last year,”
according to the report. A previous
analysis by CRP found that the country’s top
100 donors accounted for 39 percent of the $696,011,919 raised by super PACs in
the 2014 elections.”
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