Our Elections are being Poisoned By Dark Money. Let’s Do Something About It

This story ran previously on the author’s Substack.

A tsunami of TV, radio, mail, and social-media campaign ads is reaching its pre-election peak, with the greatest bludgeoning applied to voters in the diminishing number of swing districts. It’s “only” a midterm election, which many people historically pay little attention to and sit out. Yet a single race may attract tens of millions of dollars from wealthy individuals and organizations. Often it is “dark” Super PAC money whose donors are not disclosed.

Campaign finance is pretty far from my architecture-and-cities wheelhouse, but the corruption of elections seems to me a transcendent issue that America can’t ignore. I wrote about this in Spring, but this is a revision, as campaign abuses are even worse than I expected. The brazen way the power of money is used to intimidate candidates simply underlines the broader consensus that the government and U.S. capitalism are rigged against ordinary people.

We need to understand how bad this is, and how the Supreme Court has appallingly aided the purchasing of candidates and elections by well-heeled corporations and individuals. And we need to understand that ordinary people who play by the rules are not helpless.

Graft in the style of the Gilded Age

People can see not only the flow of cash and influence but also outright corruption that is quickly approaching levels unheard of since the Gilded Age—the last time wealth concentrated so much in so few hands in America.

Trump has put the American government up for sale. Collecting hundreds of millions of private “donations” for his ballroom vulgarity is only one stream in his river of fundraising graft. The brazenly open quid pro quos come in the form of government contracts and regulatory favors. Who has stopped him? Not the Justice Department he has captured.

For big-business donors, throwing cash at the ballroom is a no-brainer, an express route to getting what they want—at the expense of the American people—since there are no consequences for such bribery. Any candidate who dares to stand up to the powerful may be buried by gushing rivers of cash deployed against her and targeted by expensive and anonymous smear campaigns. (Get ready for October surprises!) After all, Trump can spend for the midterms or dole out to favored candidates later.

The limousine libertarians of Silicon Valley have contributed hundreds of millions to Trump and Republican candidates that they now own. (Supine Democrats also collect massive corporate largesse but have attracted much less of it this election cycle because they have largely avoided Trump style “pay to play.”)

Campaign lucre flows from the crypto industry, a refuge for crooks, drug dealers, and kleptocratic politicians. Crypto leaders have announced their willingness to spend big against any candidate that dares to pry into its dark corners, planning to deploy $30 million alone against Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, a critic of the industry. (Brown now tempers his earlier convictions.)

Crypto, of course, must be regulated because this opaque casbah quacks like a collection of Ponzi schemes. I look in vain for any good it does. But who is the biggest opponent of Crypto regulation? Donald Trump, once a skeptic, has become a convert who has pulled more than $1.4 billion from the industry, leaving naive investors with huge losses.

If you wonder why a federal government entirely in Republican Party hands manages to do so little to make life better for the non-wealthy, consider how Trump and the party deploy their massive caches of cash to keep members of Congress under the thumb of exploitative billionaires. Since Trump’s second term began he and his minions have used his social media army to pillory any Republican who has dared to question the “big beautiful bill,” As New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan succinctly expose in their book Regime Change. Cutting Medicaid and restricting Obamacare may not look pretty to people getting by paycheck-to-paycheck, but its extravagantly expensive and unnecessary tax goodies look gorgeous to the wealthy.

Trump doesn’t stop there. He deploys dark money to support pliable primary candidates and kick out anyone in Congress who dares to cross him. Thus Republicans in the House and Senate who thought they were working for the American people rather than the current president have discovered that money collected for favors was deployed to assure their days in Congress were numbered. Those remaining are following the money because why not? Trump is getting away with it. The last thing they want to do is reform campaign finance.

Thus you should not be surprised that promises on housing affordability, inflation, health care costs, and earnings growth—among many other issues—prove to be empty.

“Monstrous inversion” of free speech

Everyone can see that our campaign finance system is utterly broken. Unfortunately things have gotten worse since my earlier campaign-finance column.

The 2010 Supreme Court case that opened the corporate campaign casbah (couldn’t resist that alliteration) was Citizens United v. FEC. It expanded an earlier decision Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money spent to influence voters with free speech. The Citizens United decision said campaign contributions could only be limited toprevent bribery and quid pro quo corruption. It stipulated that “independent” contributions that were not coordinated with a campaign would, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion, “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Everyone now knows how wrong he was about that. “And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy,” he added. Wrong again.

Timothy Snyder, whose 2017 book On Tyranny has gained new relevance in an administration where authoritarian aspirants wield power, said in a video dialogue with activist attorney Lawrence Lessig, “The fundamental reason we have freedom of speech is so that we are protected when we say difficult things. That should privilege poor people who are oppressed.” To protect the speech of the powerful “marks a monstrous inversion” of the free-speech right, he added.

Over time, contributions made independent of candidates’ operations have not proven to be a bulwark against corruption, due to lack of enforcement. At any rate the Supreme Court last July drove a stake into the independent-expenditure limitation—setting up political parties as the conduit for unlimited anonymous cash. Take that, Kennedy.

I am leaving aside other non-monetary election abuse including the Supreme Court green-lighting the right-wing frenzy to gerrymander, attempted restrictions on mail-in voting, and Trump administration data mining in a quest to throw people off the voting rolls. Ask your candidates where they stand on these issues.

Assuming that the foregoing has not caused readers to crawl under their beds until the election madness is over, details can be found in my earlier post on how we got into our influence-buying pickle and what can be done long term with (I hope) a less beholden Congress.

Upbeat ender: there are things you can do now to beat back the vote buyers.

Reducing the power of dark money

The unrelenting campaigns aren’t helping us learn much about what candidates and parties will do because they are more successful at smearing candidates with dubious and reckless claims. The competing ad blitzes discourage people from participating. Thus everyone wonders whether a modest campaign contribution is actually meaningful. Can one person’s vote make a difference? Is volunteering for a candidate, knocking on doors, or joining an activist group hopeless in the face of special interests relentlessly pounding their messages home on every platform?

Don’t succumb. Voting is the most powerful tool unwealthy people have to be heard. Make your plan and ask everyone you know to vote. Here’s a tool that anyone can use to identify where to vote and who their candidates are.

The more people vote—especially when today’s authoritarians put new barriers in place—the more electeds realize that they must pay attention to voters, not just supporters with big bankrolls. After all, some money-drenched campaigns fail, showing that people are capable of tuning out the sordid din.

I am never a one-issue voter, but I am making an exception to choose candidates who do not take “dark” super PAC money. Those candidates are not beholden to the special interests and billionaires whose concerns may well be inimical to yours. That sends a powerful message. Many of these candidates hold far left views, but their ability to act without worrying what the donor class thinks is one reason middle-of-the-road voters—and even very conservative ones— are shifting their support to them.

Swamping a race in cash works often enough that neither party wants to forsake such a powerful weapon. Still, it may be time to say no to “establishment” party figures that say they must accept the dark money. Be skeptical. Don’t forget that a great number of people across the political spectrum who argue this point are making a great deal of money from the multi-billion dollar political campaign-industrial complex.

Ordinary citizens can probe for big money vulnerabilities. The worst AI actors have lined up to quash regulation, for example, even as some industry leaders are calling for guardrails to slow the AI juggernaut. The peoples’ weapon is data centers, which communities across the country are resisting, nominally because they pollute the air, deplete water supplies, and push up power and transmissions costs. Along with these legitimate complaints rage at tech, even as it promises to cure everything, has exploded as people watch the “hyperscalers” ignore their interests, sell their personal data to predatory actors, traumatize children, enable cyberattacks by crooks and terrorists—and maybe let AI kill us all.

I had no idea that resistance to data centers would grow so rapidly when I wrote about it, about 20 months ago. Now it is grassroots resistance to the Silicon Valley ethos of world domination that “moves fast and break things.” And it’s working, forcing the industry to pay attention to those who must clean up the mess the tech bros leave behind.

Successful resistance to data centers just shows that where there is a will to beat back the big-money election machine, there are numerous ways.