Fueled by an expanding class of billionaires, political spending on the 2022 midterm elections will shatter records at the state and federal levels, with much of it from largely unregulated super political action committees financed with enormous checks written mainly by Republican megadonors.
“We’ve broken records with our broken records,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Open Secrets, which estimated Thursday that total spending in 2021 and 2022 would reach $16.7 billion when tallied after Election Day, easily surpassing the previous midterm record of $14 billion set in 2018.
The total spent on federal races, currently $7.5 billion, has already passed the inflation-adjusted record of $7.1 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $8.9 billion when all is tallied. Of that, 15.4% has come from billionaires, up from 11.9% in 2020 and 15.3% in 2018. Beyond billionaires, the top 1% of donors, measured by income, has given 38% of the total.
The campaign finance system increasingly mirrors American society, with hundreds of thousands of small donors trying to keep pace with a billionaire class whose spending appears bottomless. Billionaires have given party-aligned ideological groups — mainly conservative ones — an easy way to surge forward.
“This is a crucial sector of the contribution base because they are able to nimbly put in whatever amounts are needed at any moment,” Krumholz said Thursday.
While both parties have their billionaires, Republicans have many more. Of the 25 top donors this cycle, 18 are Republican, according to Open Secrets, and they have outspent Democrats by $200 million. Billionaires make up 20% of total Republican donations compared with 14.5% of Democratic donations.
The largest donor of 2022 by far was a Democrat, George Soros, whose contributions of at least $126 million were nearly double the roughly $67 million that the next two largest donors, the Republicans Richard Uihlein and Kenneth C. Griffin, each ponied up.
But the Soros total is deceptive. Virtually all of Soros’ contributions, $125 million, went to his political action committee, Democracy PAC, which in turn disbursed only a small fraction of it, about $15 million.
In contrast, the $135 million from Uihlein, head of the Uline packaging giant, and Griffin, founder of Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, has flooded the Republican ecosystem with political advertising.
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