Click here for an article by Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos entitled "Just 10 mega-donors are responsible for one-fifth of all super PAC donations in the 2016 elections."
A recent Washington Post report finds that a mere 10 mega-donor individuals or couples are responsible for a staggering 20 percent of the $1.1 billion that super PACs had raised in the 2016 election cycle by the end of August. Following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, these groups have been able to raise unlimited sums from individuals and corporations, but this fundraising total far exceeds the $853 million that Super PACs raised for all of 2012—and it doesn’t yet include the last two months of this year’s campaign.
While the donations were mostly to the Republican party, billionaire Tom Steyer donated $38 million to the Democrats; Michael Bloomberg split his $20.2 million in donations between the two parties and various ballot measures. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were the largest Republican donors, giving a total of $21.5 million. The Koch brothers are noticeably absent from the list, though it's unclear how much they may have contributed through their massive fundraising network.
Citizens United isn’t responsible for everything wrong with our politics, but letting the ultra-rich dominate the conversation has done a lot of damage when their policy views are far out of sync with the general public’s. If every citizen’s voice should matter equally in a democracy, that simply cannot happen when one donor can write a check for tens of millions while most voters don’t—and many can’t—donate at all. Fortunately, if Democrats win the presidency and Senate in 2016, they are poised to install a new Supreme Court majority that could overturn Citizens United and allow us to start passing some meaningful new campaign finance restrictions.
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