It’s no mystery this election year which party the American oligarchy favors. The top 10 individual donors to the midterm elections, all of them billionaires, have thus far contributed a combined $1.2 billion, according to an October 23 Washington Post analysis. Among these 10, eight gave to Republicans and only two (George Soros and Mike Bloomberg) to Democrats. The partisan divide is even more lopsided when you count dollars. Of that combined $1.2 billion, more than $1 billion went to Republicans.
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.
If you vote Republican on November 2, you’re voting for the American oligarchy. That may not be news to you and me, but the money makes it more true today than in past elections. Mostly, you’re voting for the oligarchy’s richest member, Musk, who’s in for more than $445 million, which is more than any human ever spent on any American election (excepting the $1 billion Bloomberg blew on his own misguided presidential bid in 2020). Since July, according to Bloomberg’s Bill Allison and Dana Hull, Musk has given, on average, $3.6 million per day.
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.
Is Trump worth it? Let’s review. He’s boosted the price of oil above $100 per barrel and United States Treasury bond yields above 5 percent, creating twin crises in inflation and debt. He’s imposed tariffs that have lowered gross domestic product 0.4 percent. He’s showing increasing signs of cognitive and physical decline. He’s enriching himself at the public’s expense. And he’s using his Justice Department to try to overthrow democracy.
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.
Musk is the oligarchy’s poster child because he’s spending more than anyone else (Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein place a distant second with $150 million); because he’s the richest person in the world (net worth $935.4 billion, per Forbes); and because he is the greatest embodiment in human history of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted line (in The Great Gatsby), “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
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.
Musk has more or less shrugged DOGE off. Last week, he told his biographer Walter Isaacson, on Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, “What I should have done, I think, is be more in the background.… I got carried away, basically.” Last year Musk went further; asked by the podcaster Katie Miller (wife of Stephen Miller) whether he’d do it all again, he answered: “I mean no, I don’t think so.”
DOGE was a humanitarian, organizational, and financial catastrophe, and all Musk has to say in retrospect is, “Whoops”?
Musk is similarly susceptible to mood changes about Ukraine. Musk interrupted Ukraine’s Starlink satellite service last week, probably at Trump’s malign behest, while claiming that the country had violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it to direct offensive drone strikes in Russia. The Ukrainians said that wasn’t true. “It’s very strange that Elon Musk doesn’t know about the restrictions on Starlink’s operation in Ukraine,” said the defense technology adviser Serhii Beskrestnov, echoing complaints within the civil service about what Musk didn’t know when DOGE was rampaging through the federal bureaucracy. In both instances, Musk was given an outrageous degree of power over governmental functions based not on knowledge or competence but on wealth. Unsurprisingly, Musk’s favorability rating is as low as Trump’s, at 37 percent.
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.”
Talarico isn’t the only one to identify midterm Republican candidates with Musk. On October 12, Senator Bernie Sanders posted on X that Musk was spending $336 million to elect Republicans (this was before Federal Election Commission filings showed it to be $445 million). “STOP MUSK,” Sanders wrote. “STOP OLIGARCHY.” In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson has tied Musk’s super PAC contributions to Susan Collins. “He wants to have people that are totally beholden to him and Donald Trump, making sure we’re getting tax cuts for billionaires on the back of our healthcare system, our hospitals,” Jackson said in August. “You don’t get to buy the government you want, and we don’t want his dirty money in politics.” It wasn’t clear at that point that Collins’s campaign had benefited from Musk money, but the following month it came out that, yes, Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, had indeed spent about $170,000 in Maine to boost Collins.
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.”
Many Democrats have indeed taken Musk money in the past; according to a tally last year by Bridget Bowman of NBC News, since 2008 nearly 180 Democrats had received contributions from a Space X PAC. Then-Representative Mikie Sherrill’s acceptance of such money became the basis of an attack ad in her New Jersey race for governor. Sherrill gave the money away to a New Jersey food bank and then won decisively.
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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