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As the 2024 election cycle enters its final weeks, an elite group of philanthropists is on track to pump more into federal campaigns than ever before.
These ultra-wealthy donors, whose charitable gifts the Chronicle tracks, account for roughly 8.5 percent of the $6.3 billion that individuals and couples have contributed as of September 17, according to a Chronicle analysis of Federal Election Commission data compiled by Open Secrets, a campaign-finance watchdog.
Donors such as Ken Griffin, Paul Singer, Michael Bloomberg, and Reid Hoffman are collectively giving hundreds of millions to candidates and political-action committees called super PACs, which can receive unlimited amounts to advocate for or against candidates.
It’s an illustration of the disproportionate influence of billionaire and multimillionaire donors, whose views are often more hardline than the average partisan voter and small dollar donor, in both the nonprofit and government realms.
“Money is power, and philanthropy is just one way of being able to assert influence in society,” said Katherina Rosqueta, who leads the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy.
Of the biggest 100 political donors so far in this election cycle, 44 are also major charitable donors — individuals and couples who have signed the Giving Pledge, appeared on the Forbes list of most generous billionaires, or on the Philanthropy 50, the Chronicle’s annual ranking of Americans who give the most to charity in a year. This list also includes donors who have publicly disclosed at least $10 million in charitable contributions over time. Collectively, these donors have made political contributions in the 2023-24 election cycle totaling more than $541 million, according to the Open Secrets and Chronicle analysis.
Based on disclosures filed through August 20, these 44 donors collectively gave $104 million more to Republicans and conservative groups than they gave to Democrats and liberal groups. Several of the donors gave to candidates or PACs on both sides of the political aisle.
This tally reflects only some of major philanthropists’ political giving. Contributions that flow through 501(c)(4) nonprofits — so-called social-welfare groups, which do not have to disclose their donors and which are often called “dark money” organizations — aren’t captured in this list.
“Individuals or families of extreme wealth have a whole portfolio of ways that they are deploying their wealth,” Rosqueta said. Oftentimes, they’re using many different structures at once, each with its own set of rules about politicking and transparency.
While nonprofits have long been active in the political space, the use of dark money in politics has been on the rise, said Michael Beckel, research director of Issue One, a nonprofit that aims to reduce spending in politics.
The 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission changed the game, he said. “Wealthy Americans who want to dig deep into their pockets can truly spend unlimited amounts of money in politics.” But determining just how much money is flowing is next to impossible, he said. “The paper trail only gets you so far.”
The Top 5
Ken Griffin, the financier who has given more than $75 million to elect Republicans this cycle, tops our list.
The founder of the Miami hedge fund Citadel Group is a longtime donor to big institutions like Harvard University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, which now bears his name.
His biggest political contributions have gone to the Congressional Leadership Fund, which supports Republican House candidates, and to PACs that advocate for Republican Senate candidates Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania and Larry Hogan in Maryland.
The hedge-fund investor Paul Singer has given $38.6 million, and, like Griffin, has contributed to down-ballot Republicans but has not supported President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Singer, who signed the Giving Pledge in 2013 and directs his philanthropy through his Paul E. Singer Foundation, supports free-market economics research as well as Jewish and LGBT causes.
“The big dollar donors are having a bigger impact for Republicans this year,” says Matthew Foster, an expert on campaign finance at the School of Public Affairs at American University. Some of that can be attributed to the competitive Republican primary, he said. It’s also because support from smaller dollar Republican donors is lagging compared with 2020.
On the left, the biggest donor on our list is media mogul and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. He has contributed more than $37 million to help elect Democrats this election cycle.
Bloomberg, billionaire entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and the late investor Jim Simons and his wife, Marilyn, are all major backers of the leading pro-Biden and now pro-Harris super PAC, Future Forward.
Bloomberg’s disclosed political giving pales in comparison with his philanthropy this year. In July, Bloomberg made a $1 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University, his alma mater, that will make the university’s medical school free for most students and help expand financial aid for students in nursing and public health. That contribution is tied for the largest this year.
Who’s Missing and Why?
Some of this cycle’s biggest political donors are absent from our list — for various reasons.
Timothy Mellon, a reclusive Wyoming-based railroad magnate and an heir to Gilded Age banking tycoon Andrew Mellon, has emerged as the largest individual political donor. He publicly contributed more than $165 million to Republican presidential and congressional candidates. That includes $125 million to the Trump campaign and $25 million to a PAC supporting Robert Kennedy Jr.’s presidential bid, which the candidate suspended in August.
But Mellon hasn’t been public about his charitable giving — and 501(c)(3) nonprofits are not required to disclose their donors — so for that reason doesn’t appear on our list. Still, news reports say he’s been a major donor to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, and is bankrolling a memorial to country singer Patsy Cline. (Children’s Health Defense did not respond to an inquiry from the Chronicle.)
George Soros, the financier and founder of the Open Society Foundations, doesn’t appear on our list. He has channeled the bulk of his political contributions ($60 million) through the Fund for Policy Reform, a 501(c)(4) that supports two liberal super PACs.
In most cases, wealthy donors to dark money groups can stay out of the limelight, said Brendan Glavin, deputy research director at Open Secrets. It’s possible, even likely, that the top individual donors are also giving to these advocacy groups, he said. “In most cases, we don’t know who’s giving money to these organizations. We don’t know who they are because they don’t want anybody to know who they are.”
Social-welfare organizations, the nonprofits the IRS designates as 501(c)(4)s, are allowed to support political campaigns and causes as long as that work doesn’t comprise more than 49 percent of their activity. The use of these vehicles is on the rise post-Citizens United, said Issue One’s Michael Beckel.
“These groups that ostensibly are not designed to be strictly political or involved in elections are allowed to spend huge amounts of money in elections,” he said, influencing the ads that get aired and the issues that are emphasized. “They’re even doing some other components of the campaign that campaigns themselves have traditionally run, such as hiring canvassers and door knockers and polling and all the other sort of elements that go into running a campaign.”
Today, the use of dark money groups is baked into the system of how the parties raise money, said Glavin, with Open Secrets. “It’s part of our normal fundraising now.”
Groups on both the left and the right have pushed back on efforts to force increased nonprofit donor disclosure, arguing that privacy is a fundamental free speech right and increased transparency could hamper giving.
In the case of social-welfare nonprofits, advocates of increased transparency have a more difficult case to make than in the context of public charities, said Michael Hartmann, senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, a conservative group that monitors philanthropy and political giving. Unlike charitable gifts, donations to (c)(4)s aren’t tax deductible, and policymakers could make that deductibility a condition of disclosure.
The overlap between elite donor political and charitable giving can be viewed from different perspectives, Hartmann said.
“It could be seen as further evidence of an oligarchic overclass’s manipulation of democracy and philanthropy,” he said. “On the other hand, however, I suppose it could be evidence that these rich donors are actually minding the legal distinctions between their different types of giving.”
Disproportionate Influence, Hardline Views
The policy views of elite donors on both sides of the political aisle are sometimes more hyperpartisan than those of the average partisan voter, according to research from Stanford political economist Neil Malhotra and UC Berkeley political scientist David Broockman.
Democratic donors are very similar to regular Democratic voters on economic issues but more left-wing on social issues, Malhotra said in an email, while Republican donors are very similar to regular Republican voters on social issues but more right-wing on economic issues. This was even more true among the top 1 percent of donors, the researchers found.
“This asymmetry helps explain much of what we see in American politics: Republican politicians trying to focus on cultural wedge issues and Democratic politicians trying to emphasize economic issues,” he said.
You can see this play out in advertisements paid for by some of these billionaire donors.
Ads paid for by the pro-Trump Preserve America PAC, largely financed by Miriam Adelson, widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, position Harris as weak on crime and responsible for violence committed by undocumented immigrants. “She created the worst border crisis in American history,” the head of a border patrol union says in one ad.
An ad paid for by the Future Forward PAC emphasizes Vice President Harris’s economic message. “I’m running to fight for an America where the economy works for working people, where you only have to work one job to pay the bills, and where hard work is rewarded,” Harris says in the ad.
More Donations Ahead
Significant dollars are likely to flow in the final six weeks of the campaign when some of these donors will likely make their largest contributions, says Foster, the campaign finance expert at American University.
The Adelsons, for example, made a $90 million contribution in September 2020. This year, the head of her PAC said Miriam Adelson plans to channel $100 million into ads to help re-elect President Trump in battleground states. So far, she has publicly contributed $22.4 million, according to Open Secrets data.
Grant making through her Adelson Family Foundation — a major backer of Jewish organizations, medical research, education, and cultural exchange nonprofits in the United States and Israel — has dipped from $117 million in 2019 to $45 million in 2022, the most recent year for which information is available. That was likely due to pandemic revenue declines at the family’s casino company. A spokesman for the foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
If history is any indication, these individuals’ mega political contributions are unlikely to cause a reduction in overall philanthropy this year. Charitable giving increased in nine of the last 10 presidential election years, with the exception of the 2008 financial crisis, according to “Giving USA” data. And a study by Blackbaud suggested that in the 2012 election, donors who gave to presidential and other federal candidates tended to increase their overall donations to charity that year.
Both kinds of giving are important for people invested in various issues and causes.
“The kind of legacy that a lot of these donors are thinking about may have both charitable and political electoral aspects to it,” said Beckel. “They may want to translate their passion into charitable giving and advance the careers of politicians that they think will make better decisions about the issues that they care most deeply about.”
When it comes to the wealthiest of wealthy givers on the right and left, he said, “both sides feel like there is so much at stake.”
Data analysis by Maria Di Mento.
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