For fifteen years, I've tracked the flow of political money in America—who gives, who gets, and what it buys. After all that, I can say this with confidence: the narrative most Americans hear about money in politics largely misses the real story.

The real story isn't about the ads you see but the power you don't. It's about the candidates who never run, the policies that never get debated, and the slow, systemic drift of our democracy away from the will of the majority.

We tend to imagine corruption as a transaction: money buying votes, quid pro quos in backrooms. But money's real power is quieter and deeper. It decides which candidates get to run, which policies are thinkable, and whose voices get amplified or ignored. It has rewritten the rules of self-government—slowly, invisibly, and almost entirely within the law.

The Supreme Court has locked the front doors to reform, but the side doors remain open. To see where to start, we need to understand how money actually works inside the system—ranked from least to most consequential.

#5. Campaign Advertising: The Illusion of Influence

Here's what surprises everyone: the billions spent on campaign ads during general elections have remarkably little power to change voting behavior.

For decades, political scientists have rigorously studied this question, and the findings are overwhelmingly consistent. General election advertising—whether television or online, positive or negative—barely moves the needle when it comes to persuading voters to switch parties. Think about your own experience. How many attack ads would you need to see before abandoning your party and voting for the other side? Five? Ten? A thousand? If you're like most voters, the question itself sounds absurd.

Most people's political identities aren't built on flimsy preferences; they're powerful and durable. Your party affiliation acts as a social and psychological anchor. For most voters, a 30-second ad is like a paper airplane thrown against a brick wall—like running a commercial during the Super Bowl to convince Eagles fans to start rooting for the Cowboys. Their identity is tied to the team; they are unmovable.

A landmark meta-analysis by Joshua Kalla and David Broockman found that spending on campaign outreach—including Super PAC spending and online advertising—has essentially zero persuasive effect on voter choice in general elections. More recently, a massive 2020 study involving over 60,000 Facebook users found that removing all political ads from their feeds had no measurable impact on candidate favorability or vote choice. My own analysis of 1.2 million precinct-level results confirms this: doubling an opponent's Super PAC spending typically shifts the vote share by just 0.02 percentage points—roughly 75 votes in a typical congressional district.

Political advertising is the wellness vitamin of the campaign world—a pricey remedy backed more by faith than evidence. A vast industry of political consultants profit by convincing candidates they can't win without ever-increasing doses, turning them into endless fundraisers. The other beneficiaries are the media companies generating billions in revenue selling ad space. For candidates and voters, however, the return on investment is vanishingly small. The real influence of money lies elsewhere.

#4. Voter Mobilization: The Costly Ground Game

If ads designed to persuade voters are largely ineffective, what about voter mobilization? Here, money does have a more tangible effect. Candidates and parties invest in sophisticated get-out-the-vote operations that demonstrably increase turnout. But the data shows surprisingly modest results for huge expenditures.

Decades of research consistently find that traditional canvassing, phone calls, and mailers typically increase turnout by only one to three percentage points. In a close election, that can be decisive. A two-point bump in a congressional district with 400,000 voters is 8,000 votes—more than enough to swing a tight House race. This is why campaigns pour millions into their ground games; in a battle of inches, every inch matters.

However, these efforts are incredibly expensive and their impact is dwarfed by larger structural forces. The single biggest determinant of turnout isn't a last-minute phone call but the perceived importance of the election itself. Turnout in presidential years always exceeds midterms. Voters in battleground Wisconsin are far more likely to vote than those in safe states where the outcome is foregone.

The most significant barrier to voting has little to do with campaign spending: it's voter registration. Unlike most democracies, the U.S. places the burden of registration on individual citizens. Every time you move, especially across state lines, you must re-register—a process that can be confusing and cumbersome. Policies like automatic voter registration have far greater impact on turnout than any get-out-the-vote campaign ever could.

#3. The Money Primary: The Great Filter

So if money doesn't persuade voters and only modestly mobilizes them, where does its real power lie?

Before a single vote is cast, candidates must survive what insiders call the "money primary." This invisible, high-stakes contest demonstrates the ability to raise substantial funds. Because of partisan sorting and gerrymandering, the winner of the general election in most districts is a foregone conclusion. This makes the primary election the place where money truly matters, and as former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously put it, that contest is about "money, money, money."

Candidates without early financial backing from wealthy networks struggle to hire staff, gain media attention, and establish credibility. Many promising candidates drop out due to lack of funds before voters ever get a chance to evaluate them.

This financial gauntlet fundamentally skews who can realistically compete for office, resulting in a political class that looks nothing like America.

The median net worth of a member of Congress exceeds $1 million—roughly 12 times the median American household. While blue-collar and service-industry Americans comprise the majority of the workforce, they hold fewer than 3 percent of congressional seats.

There is a reason for that and it's not because voters prefer wealthy candidates. Running for office means months of unpaid campaigning, a luxury mostly only the financially secure can afford.

But having personal wealth isn't enough; what matters more is access to other people's wealth. This explains the dominance of the legal profession. While lawyers make up less than half of a percent of the American workforce, they hold nearly half of all congressional seats.

The scale of this imbalance is hard to overstate: relative to the average citizen, a millionaire is 10 times more likely to serve in Congress. Lawyers, by comparison, are nearly 100 times more likely. This is largely because of the money primary. My research finds that lawyers running for the House raise twice as much money in the critical first 90 days of a campaign as candidates from other backgrounds. This cash doesn't come from the public at large—about half comes directly from other lawyers. It is a closed loop of professional influence that filters out those who can't tap into a similar network.

Our elections operate less as a meritocracy producing the best leaders and more as a filter isolating the most financially connected ones. The result is a Congress where the daily economic grind of most Americans is understood only in the abstract by the people writing the laws.

The same filter that screens out working-class Americans also screens out younger ones—and for related reasons. My recent research with Jake Grumbach reveals how the campaign finance system acts as a pillar of American gerontocracy. The average political dollar now comes from a 67-year-old donor—up from 61 just eight years ago. Meanwhile, the median American is 38. Our democracy speaks with a voice nearly three decades older than its people, and that gap is widening. This creates a massive structural disadvantage for younger candidates: a 65-year-old challenger raises, on average, $207 more per early donor than a 35-year-old running in the same district. When political money talks with a 67-year-old voice, it's no wonder our policies so often look backward rather than forward. In his other research, Grumbach has shown that these fundraising pressures act similarly with respect to race as they do age.

Even for those who make it through the filter, the pressure only intensifies. Many members of Congress spend hours most day in call rooms, dialing for dollars for their next campaign. Imagine landing your dream job, only to discover that half your workday will be spent not on the work itself but on cold-calling strangers to beg for money.

This constant fundraising diverts enormous time and energy away from the actual work of governing. But the damage is deeper. It filters for a specific personality type: not necessarily the most thoughtful public servant but the one most comfortable with relentless solicitation. And it poisons the relationship between parties and their own supporters.

This desperation has spawned what I've called the fundraising-industrial complex. In 2024, campaigns burned through $3 billion just asking for more money, nearly as much as they spent on advertising. The result is increasingly manipulative appeals—subject lines screaming "BETRAYAL" or "Last Chance"—that treat supporters like ATMs rather than allies and erode trust in parties and the political process.

#2. Corporate Lobbying: The Power Brokers

While the public fixates on corporate campaign donations, this is often misdirection. The real action happens after the election is over, and its primary vehicle is lobbying.

Corporations and their trade groups have spent over $30 billion on federal lobbying since 2015. Sophisticated companies deploy a coordinated assault to shape policy. They use lobbying expenditures to influence the specific language of legislation; they exploit the "revolving door" to hire former government officials with insider knowledge and access; and they use strategic campaign donations not to buy votes but to buy goodwill, ensuring their lobbyists get a meeting when key decisions are being made.

Consider the pharmaceutical industry. During the 2022 election cycle, while public attention focused on PAC contributions totaling around $14 million, the industry spent $776 million on lobbying. This army of lobbyists, many of them former congressional staffers, didn't just oppose drug-pricing reform; they rewrote it from the inside, ensuring that even reform legislation preserved their profit margins.

The pattern repeats across industries. During the Dodd-Frank financial reform debates, Wall Street firms spent millions on campaign contributions but poured hundreds of millions into lobbying—and into hiring former regulators and congressional staffers who knew exactly which provisions to target. The result was a law riddled with carve-outs and loopholes, its rulemaking process stretched over years as lobbyists fought line-by-line battles over implementation. By the time the regulations took effect, they had been hollowed out in ways the public never saw.

The real corporate money isn't spent trying to sway your vote; it's spent in the halls of Congress, ensuring that by the time a bill comes up for a public vote, it has already been molded to serve their interests.

#1. The Ultra-Wealthy: Entrenching Oligarchy

Here we arrive at money's most dangerous influence, where the political system becomes fundamentally detached from the will of the majority and tethered to the preferences of a tiny, wealthy elite.

When the policy preferences of wealthy Americans conflict with those of everyone else, the wealthy always win. Not sometimes. Not on certain issues. Exposed to the same debates, offered the same choices, average and low-income citizens simply do not see their preferences reflected in policy outcomes at anywhere near the same rate.

This isn't a partisan story—my analysis of the Forbes 400 richest Americans shows their wealth tends to grow faster under Democratic administrations than under Republican ones. The real goal of mega-donor influence isn't to secure a specific party’s victory but to ensure that the political system, regardless of who is in charge, remains friendly to the interests of extreme wealth. It's about creating a "heads I get a subsidy, tails I get a tax loophole" policy environment.

This goes beyond lobbying; it's about the direct, personal power of mega-donors to shape government itself. After spending over $250 million to help elect Donald Trump in 2024, Elon Musk was rewarded with something unprecedented: a seat at the table of federal power. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, the world's richest man was granted extraordinary access to reshape the federal bureaucracy—inserting himself into decisions about which agencies to cut, which contracts to cancel, and which regulations to eliminate. Many of those decisions directly affected his own companies. That the relationship later soured doesn't diminish the point: a quarter-billion dollars purchased not just access, not just influence, but a quasi-governmental role that no voter elected him to fill.

Consider another example: When Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign endorsed a budget proposal including a 25 percent minimum tax on unrealized gains over $100 million—a policy affecting perhaps 10,000 of the wealthiest Americans—billionaire Mark Cuban publicly threatened to oppose her. The campaign, which had officially endorsed the policy, suddenly went silent and refused to comment when pressed by reporters. For context, 10,000 people is roughly the number of Americans who own pet tigers. A presidential campaign would not immediately backtrack if Joe Exotic claimed the country would never financially recover from a tax on tiger breeding. But when Mark Cuban made essentially the same self-interested argument, it carried real political weight.

Or consider the 2017 Republican tax bill—the signature legislative achievement of unified GOP government. The bill delivered a massive corporate rate cut and passed-through business deductions that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, while providing modest, temporary relief to middle-class families. Republican donors were explicit about the stakes. As Representative Chris Collins admitted at the time: "My donors are basically saying, 'Get it done or don't ever call me again.'" Senator Lindsey Graham warned that failure to pass the bill would mark the end of the GOP as a party. The legislative priority wasn't shaped by public demand—polls showed the bill was deeply unpopular—but by the financial threat from mega-donors who expected a return on their investment.

This dynamic is warping our political parties. In the 2024 election cycle, an astonishing 56 percent of all contributions to Republican federal campaign committees came from mega-donors giving over $1 million each. When a major party becomes so dependent on such a tiny sliver of the population, it inevitably drifts from "one person, one vote" toward "one dollar, one vote."

Here lies the ultimate irony, the thread that connects the surprising ineffectiveness of campaign advertising to the alarming power of oligarchs: mega-donors' influence doesn't primarily come from their ability to sway voters. As we've seen, advertising has remarkably limited persuasive effect. Instead, their leverage comes from convincing politicians that they need mega-donor money to win. Politicians become dependent on the wealthy not because the money actually delivers votes, but because they believe it does. This belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating a vicious cycle where the perceived need for big money gives billionaires outsized influence over the entire system, even when their campaign contributions don't meaningfully affect electoral outcomes. The oligarchs' real power isn't buying elections; it's buying the faith of the political class.

What Can Be Done?

Overturning Citizens United has become a rallying cry for reformers, and it's a worthy goal—corporations shouldn't be able to spend unlimited sums on elections. But the honest truth is that Citizens United is not the root of the problem, and simply overturning it would be far from sufficient.

The foundational damage was done in 1976, when Buckley v. Valeo established that spending money is constitutionally protected speech. That's the decision that put campaign finance reform in a legal straitjacket. And here's what most people miss: corporations were already content to spend most of their political money on lobbying before Citizens United, and they largely still are. With a few notable exceptions like the cryptocurrency industry's recent electoral spending spree, corporate America has not rushed to dominate elections directly. The explosion of super PAC money comes overwhelmingly from ultra-wealthy individuals, not corporations. Even if the Court reversed Citizens United tomorrow, the oligarchs would remain.

The front doors to reform are locked. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done.

First, there's growing evidence that public financing works. Seattle's democracy voucher program gives every resident $100 in vouchers to donate to local candidates, fundamentally changing who can afford to run. New York City's matching funds program amplifies small donations, reducing candidates' dependence on wealthy donors. The results are visible in this year's mayoral races in both cities, which feature more diverse candidates from more varied economic backgrounds than the traditional money primary would ever allow. These programs don't require the Supreme Court's permission. They can be enacted by states and cities right now.

Unlike Republicans, who would face financial collapse without their billionaire backers, Democrats would not. With only 18 percent of their funds coming from mega-donors, Democrats claim a sizable fundraising advantage among grassroots supporters that enabled them to comfortably outraise Republicans in 2024. Yet the party continues to court billionaires while campaigning against oligarchy, a tension that undermines their credibility.

Democrats should act now to leverage this strength. They should voluntarily limit contributions from wealthy individuals and reject corporate PAC money entirely. In a previous analysis, I showed they could do this while still out fundraising Republicans. They can afford to walk away. And doing so would give them something money can't buy: the credibility to make corruption the central issue of the next election.

The benefits would be immense: the moral authority to attack Republican corruption without the crippling retort of "both sides do it," and the freedom to pursue policies that benefit working Americans without donor interference.

The choice isn't between winning with big money or losing without it. It's between perpetuating a broken system that only serves to hold them back and becoming the party they claim to be. Democrats have the fundraising strength to choose the higher ground. They should take it.