Will Democracy Survive the Tsunami of Rightwing Dark Money Coming this Fall?

If Democrats survive the onslaught that’s coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic...

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

Get ready: massive pools of dark rightwing money are soon going to clobber us. Will Democracy survive this onslaught by the morbidly rich?

Democrats are giddy right now; the substantial lead that Trump had held over Biden for months has largely vanished as the match-up has changed to Harris and Walz. In the ten polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics since Biden’s withdrawal, Trump has lost 3 points and only leads by one. In the DailyKos/Civiqs poll Harris leads Trump 49/45, Reuters puts the race at 43/42, and Morning Consult has it at 47/46.

Trump is blustering in ways that indicate he thinks he’s losing (yesterday’s presser at his shabby golf motel was particularly pathetic), while JD Vance’s poll numbers are in the toilet…or the couch…and showing no indication of recovery any day soon.

That said, other lessons from this and recent past years should keep Democrats from easing up or becoming overconfident. The official beginning of the election season is still almost a month away, and the big money pledged by rightwing and neofascist billionaires hasn’t even shown up yet.

While over a hundred million pissed off women and the widespread concern that Trump and the GOP are determined to destroy the American system of government seem like a powerful force, history tells us big dark money could overcome even those substantial tailwinds.

We saw this played out here in Portland just last month. Susheela Jaypal (sister of Pramila) was a well-thought-of and successful Oregon politician, a Multnomah County commissioner, the county that includes the Portland metro area. She had a long list of great accomplishments, was well liked, and was a shoo-in to replace retiring Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer.

Until AIPAC (America Israel Public Affairs Committee) came into our district and dropped millions into the race with a deeply dishonest smear campaign.

I was getting a large 4-color hit-piece flyer about every three days in my mailbox; local radio and TV were saturated with the ads that essentially portrayed her as either evil or incompetent or both. And, right up until the election, nobody knew that AIPAC was funding the campaign; they’d set up a front group and carefully timed its incorporation so it didn’t have to disclose its funder until after the election was over.

As Jaypal noted the day after it was announced that she’d lost the election:

“This race showed so clearly why we need to have real campaign finance reform. Outside super PACs came in and spent an unprecedented $6 million, even timing their contributions so that they wouldn’t have to show who was trying to buy this election until well after the votes were cast.”

AIPAC also reportedly spent more than $14 million to take down New York’s Jamal Bowman and, just this week, knocked out Missouri Congresswoman and Squad member Cori Bush with $8 million. As the pro-Israel PAC notes on their home page, big money dropped into a race in the last weeks works: “98% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general election races in 2022.”

But AIPAC is a piker compared to what’s going to be coming down the road as the tech, banking, insurance, and fossil fuel billionaires and their companies weigh into the presidential race this fall.

A previous campaign by the fossil fuel industry is instructive, particularly since that industry sees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as enemies; Harris signed off on the largest climate legislation in world history, and Walz has required the utilities in Minnesota to be 100% carbon free by 2040, a mere 16 years from now.

In 2018, Washington Governor Jay Inslee got Initiative 1631 on the ballot; it was a modest carbon tax with a rebate attached so drivers wouldn’t be penalized. It was widely popular when it was rolled out, and everybody in the region was excited that Washington State was about to blaze a new climate-friendly path, an example for every state in the union.

That was, until the fossil fuel industry weighed in, just weeks before the election, dropping $17 million into what many called a hugely dishonest (and frightening: they claimed the tax would destroy the state’s economy) advertising campaign that blanketed the state. The ballot measure, previously seen as inevitable, was destroyed at the polls.

This is the brave new world Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote brought America when the Supreme Court, in their 2010 Citizens United decision, legalized both political bribery and massive intervention in elections by corporations and billionaires.

Prior to Thomas’ vote on that decision, Harlan Crow — who helped finance the original Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004 — and other billionaires had lavished millions on him and his family.

Crow gave the group Thomas’ wife, Ginni, started a half million dollars; he bought Thomas’ mother’s home and others in the neighborhood so she could live rent-free for the rest of her life; he put Thomas’ nephew through an expensive prep school. Another billionaire bought Thomas a quarter-million-dollar luxury RV.

It was a remarkably successful investment for Crow, his family, and his billionaire buddies. Just his own family’s political contributions went from an average of a few hundred thousand dollars a year during the decade preceding 2010 to multiple millions every year after Thomas’ vote. Americans for Tax Fairness calculated it at an 862% increase just for the Crow family.

Graphic from Americans for Tax Fairness

In this post-Citizens United era, truth has become a casualty of big money. For example, according to opensecrets.org, the Empower Parents PAC has contributed $82.5 million, Susquehanna International Group $69.7 million, Citadel LLC $59.9 million, and Uline Inc $59.6 million to Republican causes so far. And they’re just getting started.

Ever since Citizens United legalized literally unlimited contributions to the new category of political action committees it created (SuperPACs), just in the 15 months from January 2023 to April of 2024 over $8.6 billion has been raised for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65% of that money — $5.6 billion — running through PACs. And, as noted, they’re just getting started.

Governor Inslee was confident his carbon tax was going to pass, just like Jayapal, Bowman, and Bush expected a comfortable ride to re-election.

Then big money came in and lowered the boom.

So, get ready. It’s going to get ugly. There’s not a competitive House or Senate race anywhere in America that’s immune from massive dark money that’s been thrown together at the last minute to remain untraceable.

And the presidential race will be unlike anything ever seen before: already a South African immigrant billionaire has promulgated a deepfake video of Harris calling herself a DEI hire, while JD Vance is trying to Swift Boat Tim Walz.

To compound the problem, Republicans on the Federal Election Commission just announced that they will prevent that agency from regulating deepfakes in this presidential election. And in Wisconsin, dark rightwing money is attempting to reshape that state’s form of governance to give more power to Republicans in its legislature.

Did I mention they’re just getting started? We won’t even know the dimensions of the coming onslaught until it’s upon us in September and October.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, echoing a position held by fully 72% of American voters, “Our democracy shouldn’t be bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful.”

If Democrats survive the onslaught that’s coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic.

We can’t take anything for granted. We must phone bank, canvas, write postcards, talk to friends and neighbors, help people register to vote, and share the good word.

If we fail, the poison Thomas and his Republican colleagues on the Court have injected into our democracy may well prove fatal to our system of government, signaling an end to the American Experiment and the beginning of a full-blown oligarchy.