Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, American politics have been flooded by a tsunami of spending by a dizzying array of organizations. One of the lasting impacts of that decision has been to dramatically empower the country’s roughly 813 billionaires by allowing them to spend more or less unlimited amounts of cash on our elections. Democrats certainly boast their share of billionaire donors and supporters, like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, if for no other reason than that you don’t want to bring a matchbox car to a NASCAR race. But Republicans remain the party of not only the billionaire class but of the wealthy more broadly, as measured both in campaign contributions and voter preferences.
Which party benefits more from this endless stream of billionaire scratch is an incredibly easy question to answer. Open Secrets maintains a list of the top 100 individual contributors to both parties and their various outside groups during this election cycle. Republicans have been the beneficiaries of this spending by a margin of $879 million to $327 million for Democrats. Yes, you read that right – America’s wealthiest citizens have already spent well over a billion dollars on this election. Open Secrets characterizes 59 of them as solidly or leaning Republican/Conservative and just 39 as solidly or leaning Democratic/Liberal, with two “on the fence.”
It’s not just campaign contributions. While exit pollsters don’t specifically survey billionaires, they do ask about how people who make less than or more than $100,000 a year voted. Trump won that wealthier group in 2020, which of course includes billionaires, 54 percent to 42 percent. This has been true in every modern election with the exception of 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Trump himself tied with this group.
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This is pretty stark data. So, to think that Democrats are the party of billionaires, you have to first take the biggest bong rip in human history and then, your head flooded with THC fog, proceed to ignore the fact that Republicans reliably serve the billionaire class’s interests and enjoy a decisive advantage in terms of getting them to spend their largesse influencing the outcome of our elections.
Remember that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is currently propping up the entire Republican effort to hold the U.S. House of Representatives. Musk isn’t just writing checks—he’s turned Twitter, the social media website he paid $44 billion for, into a right-wing influence operation by letting any knucklehead buy a blue check and propel themselves to the top of the algorithm. Twitter, rebranded X (perhaps to stand for the generation that Musk so odiously embodies), is now an impenetrable cesspool of Nazis, influence-peddlers, grifters, disinformation artists and cranks that marches once-fringe far-right ideas proudly into the mainstream.
It makes sense that Republicans enjoy the backing of most billionaires because the Trump campaign as always is promising to do their bidding in a very straightforward fashion. Trump hasn’t exactly been generous with sharing his policy proposals (since they largely do not exist), but one thing we do know is that he is planning to drop the corporate tax rate again to 15 percent after cutting it dramatically to 21 percent with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He has no plans whatsoever to raise any further revenue from rich people, full stop.
The Harris campaign, on the other hand, is promising aggressive new tax levies on millionaires and billionaires, like imposing a 25 percent tax on people with assets over $100 million, quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks and increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. Together her proposals represent an unprecedented effort to force the ultra-wealthy to contribute a greater share of their earnings to America’s collective well-being. Harris, in effect, wants the wealthiest Americans to subsidize a new social contract that includes things like expanding Medicare to cover long-term care for the country’s burgeoning elderly population—a ton of bricks that we are all about to get hit with in a way that very few seem to properly understand.
Millionaires and billionaires who intend to vote for Harris anyway (and they are definitely out there!) probably either think that this stuff has zero chance of getting through Congress or they are so rich that they are basing their vote choice on non-material considerations like abortion , immigration, or the fact that they would simply prefer not to have an emotionally incontinent, late-septuagenarian who appears to be in severe cognitive decline running the country.
The billionaire class doesn’t mind the indiscriminate tariffs Trump is promising and almost certainly won’t actually implement, because they know another cut in the corporate tax rate will offset any losses they take on milk futures and any labor shortages that stem from Trump’s mass deportation plan. They know that even if the chances of any of it happening are slim, a president who is promising to redistribute some of their wealth is bad for their bottom lines. That’s why so many of them have opened up their digital wallets to rain cash disproportionately on Republicans and Republican-aligned organizations. People who become billionaires, like the fictional investor Russ Hanneman on HBO’s Silicon Valley, want to remain billionaires and they figure correctly that they have a better chance of maintaining that status under Trump than under Harris.
It’s not much more complicated than that, and despite the GOP’s desperate attempt to rebrand itself as the party of the working man, Republicans will win the rich vote and lose lower income voters decisively. You can take that to the bank.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
