Some of the richest people in American politics spent heavily on Tuesday’s elections, and their side lost almost everywhere.
In Texas, Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton for the Senate, after Elon Musk spent more than $200 million to help elect Paxton, according to a New York Times analysis. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech billionaire, lost the governor’s race to Democrat Amy Acton after putting an estimated $36 million of his own money into it. In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms beat Republican billionaire Rick Jackson for governor. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who entered the year with $105.7 million on hand, conceded to Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
“I think this might just be the biggest defeat for big money in politics in American history,” Logan Phillips, founder of the election forecasting site Race to the White House, told Fortune. A series of Supreme Court decisions “opened up the floodgates for near unlimited levels of spending from billionaires and super PACs,” he said, and “Democrats were able to win these races nonetheless.”
What Musk put in
Phillips put Musk’s spending at about $450 million, close to Musk’s total political giving this cycle, and said it “didn’t make a dent in Talarico’s victory, who won by 10%.”
Phillips argued the spending also gave Talarico something to run against. He pointed to an ad in which Talarico stood in front of a wall of TVs, each playing a different attack ad paid for by Musk, as he described Musk trying to buy the election. “I’ve heard Republicans say this is one of the best ads of the cycle,” Phillips said.
“You don’t want that money spent against you,” he said. “But the reality is, at the end of the day, the American people get to decide where they go as a country, not the donors.”
Ohio
Ohio’s Senate race was the second most expensive in the country, with more than $500 million spent. Democrat Sherrod Brown defeated Republican Sen. Jon Husted after making AI data centers and energy costs a defining issue. Phillips said Brown seized on it “way before anyone else was focused on it,” while Husted had been “basically at every single ribbon cutting for data centers across the state” as lieutenant governor.
“Boy, did that not age well,” Phillips said. Big-money interests went into Ohio, he said, “saying, if this guy wins, it will cause major problems for us. It didn’t matter. He still won, and he won cleanly.”
AI Super PAC funds
The AI industry’s super PACs had a poor night too. American Mission, the Republican arm of the Leading the Future network backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, put about $2.7 million behind Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina. She lost to Democrat Annie Andrews in a state Trump won by 18 points.
Phillips said his forecasting model has long treated outside spending as a poor predictor of results. What does predict success, he said, is money from regular people: individual donations, excluding PAC money and self-funding. Talarico finished the cycle as the most prolific fundraiser in the country.
“Democrats were killing on that, especially James Talarico against Paxton,” he said. “And boy, did that paint us a much clearer and more accurate picture of where this race was going to go.”
He said Republicans’ fundraising edge as the party in power was historic, since the party out of power usually leads in both fundraising and results. “It’s kind of interesting to see how much that was divorced,” he said. Phillips said he expects the results may “make Elon Musk and others think twice about spending so much,” adding, “it certainly shows that there’s a limit to the power of these donations.”
Big money may still win one fight. In California, Prop 40, a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires, was trailing 57% to 43% late Tuesday, with votes still being counted. Prop 42, a billionaire-backed countermeasure that would block the tax, was leading with about 55%. Some of the state’s wealthiest residents spent hundreds of millions to defeat the tax.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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