According to a separate tally by Americans for Tax Fairness that’s more comprehensive but less up-to-date, billionaires are on track to spend about $2 billion in 2026, twice as much as they spent in the last midterm election in 2022. Of the 170 billionaire families whose contributions ATF tallied through August 28, 113 gave predominantly to Republicans and only 45 gave predominantly to Democrats. Here, too, the partisan divide is even more lopsided when you count dollars, with 69 percent ($1.2 billion) going to Republicans and 28 percent ($488 million) going to Democrats. And that surely understates the case, because after ATF made its tally, Elon Musk more than doubled his spending to not quite half a billion dollars.
These midterms represent a kind of test for the oligarchs. Congressional Republicans have pretty slavishly supported nearly everything President Donald Trump has done, not necessarily because they agree with it but because they’re terrified of the man. When Trump tells crowds, “Please pretend I’m on the ballot,” that’s good advice. Spending money to elect Republicans to Congress is spending money to maximize Trump’s power.
None of this is news to the billionaires. But the stock market is still rising (I’ve given up guessing when it will crash), tax bills are down $300,000 on average for the top 0.1 percent of households, and regulation (except for food stamp recipients) is at a standstill. To congressional Republicans and the oligarchs showering money on them, these things matter much more than the overall health of the economy, even though any objective calculation of rational self-interest would conclude that they shouldn’t. Indeed, the further Trump’s favorability rating slouches toward terra incognita (Trump’s around 37 percent; the limbo champ is President Harry Truman at 22 percent in February 1952), the more money the oligarchs throw in Trump’s general direction.
The principal mess Musk made was the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which was not a department at all but rather a division of Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, DOGE, which was supposed to ferret out government waste, instead created government havoc; killed nearly 800,000 people, of whom more than 500,000 were children; is expected to cost the Treasury $517 billion over the next decade; and, outrageously, became a jumping-off point for its youthful Muskrats to become government profiteers.
DOGE was a humanitarian, organizational, and financial catastrophe, and all Musk has to say in retrospect is, “Whoops”?
In his Texas Senate race, Democrat James Talarico has shrewdly turned Musk into a punching bag. “Elon Musk wants our land,” he said at a San Antonio rally on Saturday, according to Bayliss Wagner in The New York Times. “He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator.” In September, Musk gave $158 million to a super PAC that immediately handed the money over to the campaign of Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, according to the Times’ Theodore Schleifer, and in August Musk gave $10 million to a different pro-Paxton super PAC that immediately started running TV ads. “Let me remind Elon,” said the narrator of a digital Talarico ad last week. “Texas is not for sale.”
Democratic candidates need to take more shots against Musk even when it can’t be shown that his spending directly affects their own campaign, because half a billion dollars is going to end up finding its way into many, many midterm races. The Princeton historian Kevin Kruse rightly complained last month on Bluesky that “Many Democrats just refuse to take the open shot at Musk. He’s a ripe, rich target, and an obvious way to dramatize key issues and mobilize key voters, but some of them are still sitting on their hands.” Kruse said he wasn’t sure whether “they’re cowards who don’t want to take him on or if they’re complicit in taking money from him and people like him.”
Democrats should demand that Republican opponents who’ve received indirect money from Musk do the same. Because these amounts are so much bigger, Republican candidates will find it much harder to do than Sherrill did. Collins, for instance, doesn’t likely have a spare $170,000 to hand off to the Little Sisters of the Poor. When Trump says, “Please pretend I’m on the ballot,” he should say, “Elon too.” If he doesn’t say it, let’s hear Democrats say it for him.
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