While there are literally dozens of decisions reached by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), and other courts, that have contributed to the ever-growing tsunami of money in our elections, there are 6 that truly stand out in terms of the importance of its impact.
| Year | Decision | Key Elements |
| 1976 | Buckley v Valeo | No limits on spending by independent groups
Only quid-pro-quo corruption is recognized |
| 1978 | First National Bank of Boston | Corporations have the right of free speech |
| 2008 | Davis v FEC | No limits to candidate spending of own funds |
| 2010 | Citizens United | Money has 1st amendment rights – no limits
Corporations have same rights as natural persons in elections. Green light and no limits to non-profit groups No limits to corporate spending |
| 2010 | Speech Now v FEC | No individual donation limits to independent PACS and Super PACS |
| 2014 | McCutcheon v FEC | No cumulative limits on individual contributions in an election cycle |
The first reality we want to make clear is that the deluge of election money continues to get worse right up to the present day. Money for federal offices nearly triples in the 2020 election cycle. See the diagram below:
When one considers the fact that we spent over $16 Billion on just the election for federal offices (congress and the presidency), we have to ask themselves if this huge amount of money could be better spent elsewhere.
As the next diagram shows, big money donors still dominate our elections. While the percentage seems to dip in 2020, it actually grew slightly when you add in the Bloomberg and Steyer campaign self funding.
So, who are these big donors, anyhow? And how much money do they give? OpenSecrets, our most trusted source for this information, has listed 100 of the top donors, and even the 100th donor gave more than $3 million in the 2020 election cycle!
But let’s look at the top 20 big donors in the 2020 election cycle. They are listed in the following table.
As can be seen above, just these 20 donors account for over $1 billion. We also see that Big Money in our elections is a non-partisan phenomenon. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of this money supports Republicans and 42% supports Democrats. Finally, Big Money can be truly big: The top 2 donors gave over a 1/3 of a billion dollars all by themselves!
As to the total scale of Big Money, one important point to keep in mind is that the above individual donor money is money that can be traced back to these individuals. However, increasingly Big Money is being donated directly to dark money organizations like non-profits engaged in the election. The above table does not include such donations by Big Money sources, as it is dark/secret.
However, MiFTE has done some in-depth analysis of OpenSecrets recent data on dark money sources and prepared the following diagram. On it we can see in the red area that starting in 2018, the amounts of money coming into the non-profits explodes from $100 Million to $600 Million. During 2020, over $600 Million is transferred by those non-profits to other groups (secret money). While it is not possible to dig deeper into the funds of these non-profits, it is quite safe to assume that the scale of this growth is only possible by BIG Money donors making donations to the non-profits to avoid exposure and limits.
Up to now, we have been looking at individual donors. The other major source group/classification for Big Money sources is organizations. Again, we can turn to OpenSecrets to get a sense of the scale of their giving. The following table presents the top 20 organizational donors in the 2020 election cycle.
Overall, with these organizations, they are more evenly split as to their partisanship. Fifty-five percent (55%) are democratic and 45% republican. Not surprisingly, the top 20 organizations donated more than the 20 top individuals – nearly $400 Million more.