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Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election [1]

['Marina Pino', 'Julia Fishman']

Date: 2025-01

The Ramifications of Citizens United in 2024

Here are some of the key ways Citizens United and other decisions shaped the 2024 campaign.

A handful of megadonors helped Trump narrow the fundraising gap with Harris, and one of them essentially helped run his campaign. The most striking consequence of Citizens United continues to be the expanded influence of the very wealthiest donors. Last year, donors who gave at least $5 million to super PACs in the presidential race spent more than twice as much as they did in 2020. Roughly 44 percent ($481 million) of all the money raised to support Trump came from just 10 individual donors. The top 10 donors supporting Harris accounted for nearly 8 percent ($126 million) of her campaign. For both candidates, most of this money came from outside groups like super PACs.

Of course, super PACs closely aligned with major candidates aren’t new. What made 2024 different was that campaigns were able to rely on these megadonor-backed, purportedly independent groups for core campaign activities. That was possible in part because of Citizens United and in part because the FEC — which already permitted significant cooperation between campaigns and super PACs — effectively eliminated most restrictions on the campaigns’ ability to outsource core voter outreach to these groups.

These changes set the stage for Musk in particular to play a central role in the election. He gave at least $277 million to two super PACs that supported Trump and other Republicans and effectively became part of the Trump campaign, frequently appearing center stage at rallies. One super PAC, to which he donated roughly $240 million, funded direct mailings, canvassing, and “spokesperson consultants” in swing states for Trump. The second, pointedly named RBG PAC after Justice Ginsburg, ran ads in swing states apparently intended to blunt criticisms regarding Trump’s record on abortion (and did not disclose who had funded its spending until after the election).

Musk was far from Trump’s only billionaire backer. Others included venture capitalist David Sacks, who hosted a fundraiser in Silicon Valley where the cheapest ticket was $50,000 ($300,000 bought a more intimate dinner with Trump); casino owner Miriam Adelson, who put more than $100 million into her own pro-Trump super PAC; packaging supplies magnate (and major donor to the election denial movement) Richard Uihlein, who sent $49 million in last year’s third quarter alone to his pro-Trump super PAC; and many other Big Tech billionaires. Collectively, these funders helped Trump make up much of his fundraising disparity with Harris.

Strikingly, while Trump relied heavily on super PACs, his actual campaign operated with a skeleton staff of only a few hundred people (compared with Harris’s more than 2,500 employees across battleground states alone) and little other infrastructure.

Of course, Harris had her own billionaire backers, most of whom also donated through super PACs and dark money groups, including tech moguls Dustin Moskovitz, Reed Hastings, and Ben Horowitz and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. In general, they do not appear to have taken on the same sort of central operational role in her campaign, however.

Megadonors also spent heavily in other federal races. Overwhelmingly, they had no ties to the states where their money landed, significantly exacerbating a trend in which more and more out-of-state money is flowing into congressional races. In marquee races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, for instance, national super PACs fueled by wealthy donors outspent several candidates’ campaigns and heavily influenced close primaries and general election races. Ohio’s Republican Senate primary attracted more than $20 million from nationally funded independent groups (with the two biggest donors hailing from Pennsylvania and Illinois), and Arizona’s Democratic primary for the Third Congressional District lured in $5.3 million from outside groups — twice as much as the campaigns themselves did.

Massive spending was not the only way that billionaires were able to shape the 2024 race. Most notably, Musk leveraged his ownership of the social media platform X to support his preferred candidates. X amplified Musk’s activity, including his pro-Trump posts, so that they appeared in the feed of every subscriber, and took other actions that likely benefited Trump and other candidates, such as hosting Ron DeSantis’s announcement of his own presidential campaign. Prior to Citizens United, the direct use of corporate resources to advocate for a candidate was typically limited to traditional press activities, which are exempt from most campaign finance rules. Now, however, a corporation like X — which, had it existed prior to Citizens United, would likely not have been categorized as engaging in press activity — has much broader leeway to harness its resources in support of its owner’s preferred candidates.

Dark money continued to dominate federal contests. While final numbers are not yet available, in 2024 anonymous sources directed more than $1 billion, at a minimum, to independent political committees supporting candidates on both sides of the aisle. The largest outside group supporting the Harris campaign was a super PAC funded by dark money groups. The Trump campaign also benefited from such secret spending, including by one group that reportedly raised $100 million over four years.

Dark money also played a pivotal role in many Senate and House races. The four dark money groups associated with House and Senate Democratic and Republican campaigns gave $182 million to their sister super PACs through the end of last September. These purportedly independent groups were, in practice, effectively part of each party’s campaign apparatus. This strategy is certainly not novel — for a decade, both parties have had shadow party super PACs through which they have been able to raise unlimited contributions. Still, while the numbers are not yet final, the flood of dark money likely broke records in 2024.

Thanks to legal loopholes and lax enforcement of current rules, tracking this surge of secret cash is becoming ever more difficult. Dark money groups are required to report spending for only certain activities, including independent expenditures and electioneering communications, which they increasingly do not run themselves. They are not required to disclose donations to other groups (although the recipients may have to disclose these donations) nor many types of campaign advertising, including most online ads, which surged last year. (The Brennan Center will release a comprehensive tabulation in the coming months.)

Candidates and parties turned to joint fundraising committees to foot their big bills in new ways. Joint fundraising committees are PACs formed by multiple candidates, parties, and PACs to raise money together. These groups took on a much more significant role for campaigns last year. Because McCutcheon invalidated aggregate contribution limits, joint fundraising committees can raise enormous amounts in direct donations. In theory, participants are supposed to allocate donations pursuant to a prearranged formula.

In 2024, however, an FEC deadlock created a new loophole, allowing these fundraising entities to themselves run campaign ads without allocating their costs, effectively allowing some participants to subsidize others. Both parties availed themselves of this loophole, but Republicans in particular exploited it. The National Republican Senatorial Committee spent millions of dollars through joint fundraising committees, mostly in battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Democrats, who originally urged the FEC to crack down on this practice, responded by saying they would use the same tactics for ads going forward.

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[1] Url: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fifteen-years-later-citizens-united-defined-2024-election

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