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super pacs
Sanders Cheers New DNC Push to Curb Dark Money in Democratic Presidential Primaries
"Billionaire-funded super PACs like AIPAC and crypto shouldn't be able to undermine democracy and determine Democratic candidates," said the senator. "This principle should apply to congressional primaries too."
Aug 12, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the advocacy group he helped found applauded a new resolution from Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, revealed Tuesday, that aims to limit corporate and dark money spending in the party's next presidential primary.
CNN obtained a draft of the resolution that Martin plans to introduce at the DNC's August 25-27 meeting in Minneapolis. The outlet reported that it calls for creating a panel that would identify and study "real, enforceable steps the DNC can take to eliminate unlimited corporate and dark money in its 2028 presidential primary process."
The draft "does not explicitly mention" super political action committees, "and it's not clear whether it will ultimately restrict super PAC spending in party primaries," according to CNN. It also says that the "only way to solve for this problem in the long term is through congressional action, including a constitutional amendment" to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to corporate spending on elections.
Still, Sanders (I-Vt.)—who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020—welcomed the proposal as progress, writing on social media Tuesday, "Congrats to the DNC for starting the process to ban Big Money from presidential primaries."
"Billionaire-funded super PACs like AIPAC and Crypto shouldn't be able to undermine democracy and determine Democratic candidates," he added, calling out the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This principle should apply to congressional primaries too."
Sanders and seven of his Democratic colleagues—Sens. Ed Markey (Mass.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Chris Murphy (Conn.), Tina Smith (Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Peter Welch (Vt.)—wrote to Martin and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) in June, urging them to curb the influence of rich donors and super PACs in party primaries.
Last year's federal elections were devastating for Democrats, who lost not only the White House but also both chambers of Congress. In the wake of that, Sanders said that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
"Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?" he wondered at the time. "Probably not."
While then-DNC Chair Jaime Harrison swiftly lashed out at Sanders in November, calling his critique "straight up BS," the forthcoming resolution is a sign that Martin may be listening to key progressives—as well as registered Democrats and Independent voters, who are frustrated with the party and want to see elected officials fight harder for working people.
Just before the February DNC election in which Martin was victorious, Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, the group that grew out of Sanders' first presidential campaign, declared that "this moment demands a Democratic Party that provides more than just reactive opposition to an administration bent on rigging our economic and political systems in favor of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals on Earth."
Geevarghese also stressed the need for "leaders who put the party's grassroots base ahead of the donor class" and reject corporate rule, and accused Democratic leadership of "failing disastrously to meet this urgent mandate."
On Tuesday, Geevarghese welcomed the reporting on Martin's proposal, saying that "for the last 15 years, the disgraceful Citizens United ruling has unleashed a flood of spending from dark money groups and corporate super PACs that has drowned out working people's voices and sidelined the progressive candidates our party needs to challenge the corrupt billionaire class."
"This resolution is a crucial step to ensure the Democratic presidential nominee is chosen by everyday people—not deep-pocketed donors and the special interests they serve," he added. "We urge every DNC member to rise to the moment, back this fight, and put power back where it belongs—in the hands of voters, not the billionaires."
'Unprecedented': Trump Can't Run Again, So Why Is His Super PAC Raising Record-Busting Sums of Cash?
"Trump's super PAC has used pay-to-play to raise big money from special interests like a legalized shakedown," said an advocate for Public Citizen.
Aug 06, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is constitutionally prohibited from being elected to a third term in office, but that's not stopping his super political action committee from raising eye-popping sums of money.
A report from the Brennan Center for Justice released on Tuesday found that MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump's political campaigns, raised an "unprecedented" sum of $200 million between last November's presidential election and the end of June 2025. This massive war chest is more than six times the amount that former President Joe Biden's super PAC raised between the November 2020 election and the end of June 2021.
The Brennan Center also said that MAGA Inc. has become "almost exclusively a game for the richest of the rich," with 96% of the money it's received over the last seven-plus months coming "from donors who gave more than $1 million each." This massive fundraising haul raises serious questions about where this money is going, presuming that Trump isn't going to try to run for an unconstitutional third term.
The biggest donors to the super PAC have been entities that might benefit from regulatory or policy changes that the government could enact: Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, donated $25 million; investor Jeffrey Yass, whose company Susquehanna International Group owns a large stake in the parent company of Chinese social media app TikTok, donated $16 million; and Foris Dax Inc., the firm behind Crypto.com, donated $10 million.
Advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday took a look at the donations pouring into MAGA Inc. and found that cryptocurrency companies, executives, and investors had forked over a total of $41.7 million to the PAC, while fossil fuel companies and executives had shelled out $26.8 million.
Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen, said that the massive sums being given to the PAC should raise real questions about corruption.
"The real question this mega-donor list raises is not 'how much,' but 'who from?'" he said. "By taking contributions from wealthy individuals and industries who want something from government, Trump's super PAC has used pay-to-play to raise big money from special interests like a legalized shakedown."
The Brennan Center similarly raised corruption concerns and said the super PAC's dealings were yet another example of how the
U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to scrap all limits on campaign donations from corporations and outsized interest groups had damaged the integrity of American politics.
"The degree to which wealthy donors appear to be using super PAC contributions to curry favor with the Trump administration once again illustrates how wrong the Supreme Court was... when it predicted that the 'independence' of groups like super PACs would prevent them from becoming vehicles for real or perceived corruption," the Brennan Center wrote.
A report from Politico last week suggested that the MAGA Inc. war chest could give Trump unprecedented power for an incumbent president to influence the 2026 midterm elections.
"Having millions of dollars at Trump's disposal—an unheard of amount for a sitting president who cannot run again—could allow him to become one of the biggest single players in next year's midterms, alongside long-standing GOP stalwarts like the Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund," explained Politico. "Trump could boost his preferred candidates in GOP primaries, or flood the zone in competitive general election races in an effort to help Republicans keep control of Congress."
Trump has not yet ruled out running for a third term in office even though the United States Constitution's 22nd Amendment explicitly states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
American Politics Are in Trouble
As long as the billionaire-funded groups remain the dominant players in the political process, the Democratic reformers will continue to face an uphill battle to wrest back control over elections and party affairs.
Jul 28, 2025
American political parties are in disarray. Instead of being the engines that organize and drive our politics, their roles have been supplanted by partisan social media influencers, nonprofit political groups, super PACs, and the billionaires who fund them and consultant groups they hire.
A few generations ago, it was the political parties that organized politics. In many communities, there was an organic connection between the parties and their members. The parties provided structure and access and some benefits to those who belonged to and participated in their work.
That is no longer the case for most Americans. Today, the parties have become “brands” to which voters are asked to identify, and fundraising vehicles raising money for party operations and the consultant groups who now provide the “services”—message testing, voter data files, advertising, and communications.
In other words, the connection between most voters and political parties is largely limited to a loose identification with the brand and to being on lists for fundraising emails, text messages, social media posts, or robocalls asking for money or votes. While these efforts do raise some funds, the amounts pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions contributed by billionaire donors who fill the coffers of the parties and the increasingly powerful liberal or conservative “unaffiliated” interest groups and political action committees.
What needs to happen and is still not on the agenda is for the parties to reform and reconnect with and earn the trust of voters by rebuilding their state and local infrastructures.
It has been reported that in the 2024 presidential contest, one of these liberal independent committees raised and spent almost as much as the Harris campaign (about a billion dollars) on messaging that was sometimes at cross-purposes with the Harris campaign they were supposedly backing. Republican independent expenditure groups did much the same, with one spending a quarter of a billion dollars targeting Arab and Jewish voters with disinformation mailings and ads designed to suppress their votes. In the end, the billions spent by the campaigns and the independent groups deluged voters with messages and counter-messages, causing confusion and alienation.
Even when the parties provided funding to consultants to make personal contact with voters by hiring canvassers to go door-to-door or phone banks to call voter lists, the efforts were perfunctory and unconvincing because the canvassers or callers had no organic ties to the voters they were engaging. This is in marked contrast to decades ago, when the canvassers and callers were local elected party captains engaging their neighbors with whom they had personal ties.
This lack of organic connection with voters, the weakness of the party infrastructures, and the barrage of television, social media, and other forms of digital messaging are some of the reasons why party identification is at an all-time low, with 43% of Americans now identifying as independent, and Republicans and Democrats tied at 27% each.
The parties have also lost their role in governing their electoral operations to the billionaires and interest groups. Look at the role they played in defeating congressional Democratic incumbents in the last election or how billionaire donors are stepping over the will of Democratic voters in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race. During the primary contest, these interests spent $30 million in advertising to smear and defeat a progressive candidate, Zohran Mamdani. Now, despite Mamdani’s decisive win as the Democratic Party candidate, the same billionaires have pooled their money to support an independent in the November election. To date, Democratic officials haven’t criticized this move. The party has a rule stipulating that consultants who work against Democratic voter-endorsed incumbents or candidates will not be eligible for party-funded contracts. This sanction has not been applied to those groups that accepted contracts to defeat pro-Palestinian incumbent congressional Democrats, a clear demonstration of the “official” party’s weakness in the face of billionaire spending.
After losing 1,200 federal and state legislative seats during the Obama era and suffering defeats in two of the last three presidential elections, I was initially optimistic to see two New York Times headlines last week, one of which read, “Democrats Are Mulling a 2026 Campaign Pivot: ‘We Need to Rethink Things.’” It appears that autopsies are being conducted to understand why Democrats are losing. After reading the piece, however, it became clear that some of the groups conducting the autopsies are the very independent expenditure-funded consultants that are the source of the problem. Their solution: better message testing, better use of social media and digital messaging, etc. In other words, pay us more and we’ll dig the hole deeper. No lessons learned.
What needs to happen and is still not on the agenda is for the parties to reform and reconnect with and earn the trust of voters by rebuilding their state and local infrastructures. There is a push in that direction being made in the Democratic Party by some of its newly elected leaders. Spurred on by party reformers, they have greatly increased the funds being given to state parties, reducing the amounts sent to outside consultants. But as long as the billionaire-funded groups remain the dominant players in the political process, the Democratic reformers will continue to face an uphill battle to wrest back control over elections and party affairs.
Meanwhile, the Republican side appears to be a lost cause. President Donald Trump and his cult-like MAGA movement have been able to take advantage of the weakness of their party’s organization, forcing it to submit and transforming it into a wholly owned Trump subsidiary. Republicans who opposed Trump’s conquest have either been demeaned and silenced or drifted away to form PACs that have focused their resources on “anti-Trump” advertising campaigns, which, while celebrated by some Democrats, have had no impact on rebuilding the Republican Party.
The bottom line is that American politics has become less a battle between two competing organized political parties and more a contest between billionaire-funded entities waging virtual campaigns attempting to lure voters to endorse their “brands.” Until a significant effort is made to regulate the corrosive role of big money in politics, this will continue as will voter disaffection and alienation.
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