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- [00:02]
A
I want you to imagine something. It's 1991, October, and your house phone doesn't ring after 5pm unless it's a friend or family member. You sit down to watch tv and the commercials are for local businesses, network television and fast food chains. Your money is your own and no one is bothering you for a quick $5, $10, or even $100. There's no urgency, actually, for anything. You may have even totally forgotten that it's an election year, and a mighty important one at that. George H.W. bush for reelection against Bill Clinton. And while they appear on late night shows and vie for your votes, there are laws around campaign finance that basically make the entire tenor of the campaign year much less intense. And it remains pretty much the same until 2010, when the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling comes down, upending settled law and leading to, well, this.
- [00:55]
B
The question I hear all the time is how can my $20 matter if Elon Musk is giving 20 million? And it actually really does. That's part of my job every day, is to try to convince people of their own power in the ecosystem. Because that hopelessness that you feel is what gets you to check out. And that's what gives Elon Musk more power in that $20 million. If that $20 million doesn't just buy ads, but it also buys your silence.
- [01:23]
A
Campaign finance, a fraud situation made worse in the past 15 years by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Just in case you aren't familiar, Citizens.
- [01:32]
C
United was a Supreme court decision in January 2010. So it's actually been 15 years living under this ruling, kind of boiled down to its basics. It took two really terrible ideas and it merged them together. And it said money equals speech and corporations are people. And both of those things we think are bullshit.
- [01:55]
A
That's Tiffany Mueller, president of in Citizens United, whose goal is to wr.
- [02:02]
C
Anyway, it put a for sale sign on our democracy and it really let this kind of unlimited, undisclosed, unfettered money into our system. And what we've seen since then is a politics that is being controlled by the special interest. We see every single election cycle breaking a new spending record and more and more of the power in our society and in our democracy being accumulated into the hands of a very few. So here we are, we're 15 years after the decision. We just had $20 billion spent in the 2024 election, which is just obscene money, $20 billion with a B. And we're seeing kind of the most brazen corruption that we have seen in probably 100 years in our country. And so you know, from crypto scandals to meme coins to selling Teslas on the white to no big contracts to Doge to Elon Musk, we are living in this moment where the corruption is out there for everyone to see. People are losing faith and trust in our government and we are seeing the money control the outcomes.
- [03:22]
A
You feel it. Everyone can tell something isn't right. It's pretty self evident that more money in politics means a more corrupt system and a worse representative democracy. So how at all is it better to let the super rich and moneyed interests dictate our politics?
- [03:44]
B
The amount of dollars flowing into campaigns and into political causes broadly has exploded since 2010, roughly doubling every four year cycle. We're now spending upwards of $20 billion in political money on every presidential election cycle on, on both sides of the aisle. That doesn't even count all of the money because there truly can not be a complete count when you factor in all of the 501c3 nonprofit organizations. The 501c4 is the dark money groups that don't have the same public disclosure requirements that candidates and PACs do. And that creates a system where we actually don't even know the full extent of the money being spent. But from what we do know, we can see this really sharp increase as our politics becomes more polarized and therefore the stakes to different constituencies, corporations, the wealthy and everyday people, all become higher. People are willing to put more and more dollars into winning these races.
- [04:57]
A
You heard him earlier. But this is Brian Derrick, the co founder and CEO of Oath, which is a donation platform for Democrats that helps them figure out where their donations have maximum impact.
- [05:08]
B
Perhaps the 2024 election shows us the most clear example of this. When you had billionaires like Elon Musk, but many others as well willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on electing Donald Trump because then they immediately saw a over trillion dollar tax cut as a result of putting him and Republicans in power in dc. And so just thinking about it from a pure ROI perspective, it's easy math for them. And that's what's driving more and more dollars into the political space.
- [05:43]
C
We're seeing kind of the most brazen that we have seen in probably 100 years in our country. From crypto scandals to meme coins to selling Teslas on the White House lawn, to no big contracts to Doge to Elon Musk, we are living in this moment where the corruption is out there for everyone to see. People are losing faith and trust in our government. And we are seeing the money control the outcome. But that is essentially what the court did. It was a 54 decision. So it was one of the close decisions. And to overturn it, we either ultimately we need the Supreme Court to overturn itself or a constitutional amendment. Both are, yes, really hard. But there's a ton we could do right now with a simple vote in Congress if we just had the right people in office.
- [06:37]
A
But we don't have the right people in office, enough of them at least. So what we're left with with is a bunch of people who've been installed because of all of this money in our politics.
- [06:47]
B
So who controls the money outside of a presidential election? There appears several other groups to fill that void. Essentially, the PACs that are in charge of winning a majority for either party in the Senate and in the House become essentially the top dogs in the fundraising world, where you have tons of money flowing, yes, to the DNC and the RNC. But really, if you look at the super PACs that are focused on electing their candidates for federal office, that's where you see the largest donations flowing and the ultra high net worth donors spending the most time and energy in order to get their candidates into office. I would say one ring out further from that would be like what we would call the C3 and C4 organizations, 501 C3s to which donations are tax deductible, and 501 C4s, which are also known as dark money groups where donations are not tax deductible, have also incredibly important and expansive roles in these races where donors are looking to spend billions of dollars in not just electing candidates and running ads, but also in creating an environment and controlling the narrative in registering voters and turning out electorate that is going to benefit their candidates. And so it's a very layered ecosystem, very complex. People who don't spend all of their time in random filings like maybe I do, but all of these entities have a role to play or I guess some blame to take in. How money has corrupted our political system.
- [08:26]
A
When we come back, what all this means for regular everyday people. We now know how fully breaded political action committees have used billions of dollars to influence elections and thus our lives. But I was curious how, if at all, regular people have changed behavior. Since the Citizens United decision, There's been.
- [08:48]
B
A dramatic uptick in the number of Americans who choose to make political donations over the past few cycles. It went from something that was really quite rare to something that actually a majority of registered Democrats say that they've done within the last two election cycles. That matters because we need a grassroots counterweight to this big dollar money that's being poured in to support the ultra wealthy and corporate interests. That is one, not the only, but one critical reason that our public policy doesn't reflect the needs of the everyday people is because these special interest groups, these corporations, are spending obscene amounts to distort either the perception of public opinion or the incentives of our elected officials in delivering on the policy that the rest of us want. We can fight back against that also using campaign finance.
- [09:47]
A
This isn't the first period that the corporate corruption of politics was a major concern. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Tillman act due to concerns of the political power of corporations during the Gilded Age. So what made us say screw that and jump off of a cliff into the political cesspool we're all suffering through today?
- [10:06]
C
The backstory behind the case is actually that there is this corporation organization called Citizens United and they wanted to run an attack ad against Hillary Clinton back during the 2008 presidential primary. But we had had a law in Americ America that kept corporations from being able to directly spend in our elections, to affect our elections for a hundred years back when they were trying to figure out ways to take on the power of monopolies back in the Gilded Age. Right. So this isn't the first time we faced this as a country, but for a hundred years we kept corporations from spending in our elections. And the theory around that is pretty simple. Corporations already have a really, really big amount of power in our policy making and in our society. It was believed that it could corrupt and over influence our elections if corporations were to spend directly in it. And look, here we are 15 years later. So this organization, it was a corporation, Citizens United, wanted to run an attack ad against Hillary Clinton. They wanted to run a documentary actually against her and they weren't allowed to. And so challenged this case on a freedom of speech type of case. And that is actually how it started to work its way up to where then in 2010, the Citizens United case was decided by the supreme court in this 5, 4 decision that ended up saying both money equals speech and corporations are people. And basically what it said is, look, if individuals have the right to spend in our elections, corporations should have that same right. But we know corporations aren't people like of course they're not. Yes, they are granted some of the same legal rights, but when it comes to our elections and protecting them from influence and from corruption, there should be a higher Standard, Right? Here's the other thing. People will laugh about this, but the Supreme Court kind of based their decision on two. I want to say they were being naive, but honestly I think that they were just being a little bit corrupting. One was that the money spent in our elections be disclosed and transparent and that we would be able to trace back where the money was coming from so we could basically call out candidates for who they were taking money from. That was number one. Even the most conservative of justices, even Justice Scalia, said the money should be disclosed and transparent. That's point number one. Point number two, they said the money itself isn't corrupting, which unless it was a direct quid pro quo. So you're running for office, I hand you $5,000 and say, Please vote this way. Right? That is corruption in the eyes of the Supreme Court. But we know if you're running for office and I hand you $5,000 and I say, would you consider this bill or this priority that we have, of course you're going to take that into extra consideration. Or if the people who are filling your time are the biggest donors who care more about tax breaks and deregulation, that's going to drive a policy agenda.
- [13:23]
A
And Obama at the time saw this coming. In his 2010 State of the Union, he called out the Supreme Court for their decision in Citizens United last week.
- [13:33]
B
The Supreme Court reversed a century of.
- [13:35]
C
Law that I believe will open the.
- [13:37]
B
Floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign enemies.
- [13:51]
A
It was a real mask off moment, especially for the upside down flag waving Justice Samuel Alito, who can be seen grimacing and saying, not true. Sure, Sam.
- [14:03]
C
What we've seen since then is the Supreme Court was wrong in every single aspect. Right? Number one, obviously the money is corrupting. I don't think I need to convince people of that. But all you have to do is look at where we're at now, look.
- [14:15]
A
At the history of people in the world.
- [14:19]
C
In the world. But number two, like the dark money, undisclosed money, money that we don't know where it's coming from, has skyrocketed since the decision. Prior to Citizens United, we Knew where about 75% of the money in our elections came from. Now it's only about 25% of the money, which means you have foreign money getting into our system. You have obviously billionaire money, corporate money. There are corporations trying to hide their donations because they don't want to be called out for it, but they want the access. It is a disaster, an utter disaster.
- [14:53]
A
Bleek doesn't even begin to cover it. After a short break, we'll talk about better ways we as individuals can contribute to campaigns when we're up against so much.
- [15:06]
C
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- [15:36]
A
I'm curious, like, what are some of the ways that well intentioned people waste their money in politics? Right? Like there are lots of people who are challenging Republicans in districts where they are guaranteed to win just because the numbers are in their favor. And you know, people do give money there because they want the hope of getting rid of that person. They're usually pretty toxic. Toxic. But what are some other ways, I guess, that people are not being very smart with their money?
- [16:01]
B
How long do we have on this podcast? Because it is a list. It is a list, guys, we've really got to tighten up what we're doing. Very quickly. I'll go from the biggest waste to the smartest ways to spend. Biggest waste is to give to a scam pack. They have exploded in the last four to six years where you have PACs being set up under a really generic name, let's say Defeat Republicans PAC or American Retirees pac. They're sending out millions of text messages asking people to donate to support beating Republicans to support the needs of retirees, whatever. And then they are spending that money on themselves. They're not giving it to candidates. It is an actual scam and it's been hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several cycles. People have no idea the extent to which. There's a really good piece that was in the news recently that caused a big uproar about how much money has been wasted. The next biggest waste is in the kinds of races that you're talking about. And I would argue that a lot of it is rage donating that someone sees somebody or something that they really don't like. A headline, a Supreme Court ruling, a quote from a, let's say extremely far right member of Congress and immediately wants to look for a button to to smash A donate button to smash. Often times that money is going to be put somewhere that it's not going to be used as efficiently as it could be. We are spending over a hundred million dollars per Senate race these days. And people, regardless of how much the candidate has, continue to just give and give and give, no matter how competitive or not competitive that that race might be. So that would be one focus on the races that are actually competitive. So the next is really on the overfunded races. To go a point further on what I just mentioned, it's not enough that a race is close. It also needs to be somewhere where your dollars are still needed. We talk about a lot the point of diminishing returns where at a certain point after you've shown everybody the same ad 25 times, you just can't get anything more out of another 20 bucks. And so look for candidates that are underfunded, that are being outraised, or that are further down ballot where the entire cost of the race is significantly less than these super high profile races. The last example of wasted money is people giving too late in the cycle. If I give to a candidate who's running in 2026 right now, they can go use that money to hire a campaign manager to work on their local communication strategy, to build out a volunteer network to do all kinds of recruitment and deployment of really strategic resources. If I give that same money in October of 2026, all they can do is buy more ads and they can't even, they can't even do new ads. It's too late. All you can do is more ad inventory for what you've already cut. It's not an efficient use of dollars. So people should be giving way earlier than they typically would. We see almost 40% of all campaign donations come in the last 60 days before an election. Huge chunk of that ends up getting wasted.
- [19:09]
A
Do you have a general idea or just a take on the amount of money that's just lit on fire each every time there's an election?
- [19:17]
B
Definitely in the 2024 cycle, about 67% of all money that Democrats gave to U.S. senate candidates went to a race that was decided by more than 5%. So another way of saying that is a vast majority of the funds went to a race that in the end wasn't really that close. And in most of those situations, most of those races, we knew that from the beginning that it wasn't going to be super close. We tried to do the exact opposite. We tried to direct over two thirds of all donations to races decided by less than 5%, I would quantify the approximate waste of of resources in the 2024 cycle. It's hard to to pin down an exact number, but somewhere between 600 and $800 million that we think could have been much better spent in a different race had someone had more information when they were donating.
- [20:19]
A
So how is it better to upend all rules about campaign finance to give giant corporations and moneyed interests higher priority in our democratic process? Once again, it's not. I searched high and low for any benefit to the average person and frankly, the Citizens United decision disenfranchised voters and created a situation where the only way to be competitive as a candidate for office is to raise outrageous sums of money keeping out everyday public servants from the process. But we aren't done investigating this yet. In part two of our deep dive into campaign Finance, I speak with Kat Abogazale about her run for office in Chicago and how money and politics has shaped every part of the process. Tune in next week to hear about how she's navigating and trying to shake up this system. Thanks for listening to or watching How Is this Better? Make sure you're following or subscribing on your platform of choice, including our very own YouTube page@YouTube.com owis this better? And if you can leave a rating and review or comment on the episodes because all of it is super helpful in spreading the reach of the show and we appreciate you. How Is this Better? Is written and hosted by me, Akilah Hughes. It's produced by Devin Maroney, video editing is by Shane Verkus, Kevin Dreyfuss is Courier's National Managing director and Executive producer, RC Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social, and Charlotte Robertson is the Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Samantha Hollows is the YouTube and podcast growth marketer and Marianne Kuga is the director of marketing. Tracy Kaplan is the senior Vice President of Sales and distribution, and if you're interested in advertising or sponsoring, you can reach her@advertiseuriernewsroom.com show artwork is by Danielle Deplato and original theme music is by Used People.