Democrats’ Self-Funder Problem

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Scott Bauer/AP Photo

Wisconsin Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, holding her son Hartley, throws her support to Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes after dropping out of the Democratic race for U.S. Senate less than two weeks before the primary, July 29, 2022, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

Rich Democrats are running for office, and not just a few of them. In some of the party’s most consequential races, including a number of House and Senate primaries that will be decided today in Michigan and Wisconsin, self-funded candidates are playing an outsized role in shaping the primary process, and not for the better.

Party leaders love self-funders, because they don’t require the party to raise money on their behalf, or dedicate limited resources to elevate their profile in contested general elections. But self-funded candidates are notoriously weak, and, especially in 2022, have paid their way into critical positions in Senate races that could easily decide whether the party gets a Manchinema-proof majority or loses its majority outright. In Wisconsin and Missouri especially, perhaps the most promising pickup opportunities this side of Pennsylvania, self-funders have badly mucked up the primary process, imperiling Democrats in must-win contests.

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Those two races have trended in distinctly different directions. Missouri’s Senate primary, which will be decided today, is between ex-Marine and anti-monopoly advocate Lucas Kunce and scion of the Anheuser Busch fortune Trudy Busch Valentine. Valentine, worth a reported $215 million, has self-funded her campaign lavishly to the tune of nearly $3 million, which makes up an astounding 85 percent of her fundraising. But that hasn’t made her an effective or polished candidate. In one high-profile gaffe, she was unable to answer whether she supports a law prohibiting instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation. When asked about gender-affirming care for trans people, she didn’t have an answer either. And putting an even finer point on it, Valentine recently admitted that she didn’t even know what Citizens United was, the landmark Supreme Court case that opened the door to unlimited money in politics, in a video that has since gone semi-viral on Twitter. Rich people often greatly overestimate their own knowledge and experience—one is reminded of Betsy DeVos, who similarly bought a Cabinet position for herself, reacting with blank incomprehension to elementary questions about the department she wished to run.

Valentine, whose candidacy would not exist without her family’s dynastic wealth, remains in a strong position to win the nomination, an outcome that would be disastrous for Democrats in a race against a handful of surprisingly unpopular Republican candidates. The editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in its endorsement of Kunce, noted that “Valentine came off as unprepared and unconvincing.” Longtime front-runner Eric Greitens, a Trump-approved accused domestic abuser, would be extremely vulnerable against Kunce in what looks like a huge pickup opportunity for Democrats; so too would now-surging state attorney general Eric Schmitt, who infamously filed a costly stunt lawsuit against China over the spread of COVID-19, after supporting a plan to turn St. Louis into a trade hub with China. If Valentine is able to buy the nomination as a multimillionaire backed by the philanthropic community of St. Louis as her primary constituency, Republicans will breathe easier despite nominating an unfavorable candidate.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin, which goes to the polls in one week, two self-funders poured in huge quantities of their own money to keep the race a muddle for almost a year. According to FEC filings, Alex Lasry, whose father is a billionaire hedge fund manager and owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, lent almost $15 million of his own money to his campaign to become the race’s leading moderate—an astonishing cash infusion that for a long time had him running near the front of the pack. As Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes began to pull away in polls, Lasry put millions toward an ad blitz that kept the race close. State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, meanwhile, a multimillionaire herself, lent her campaign $3.5 million, also representing the majority of her fundraising, and keeping her competitive. And then, less than two weeks before Election Day, both candidates abruptly dropped out.

The proliferation of self-funders is not only hugely inefficient in its use of funds, but it has elevated weaker candidates to the disservice of the party’s competitiveness nationwide.

That spending was not without consequence. Neither self-funded candidate was strong enough to convert their own riches into a meaningful lead, but their effectively infinite cash kept them in the race much longer than they otherwise would have been, without ever building a meaningful constituency. Crucially, this kept the primary process from vetting the best candidate or shaping the policy platform in any purposeful way. Their combined outlay of nearly $20 million netted zero votes, wildly distorted the political discourse—and now Wisconsin voters don’t even get to choose a candidate at all. Mandela Barnes, largely untested or pushed on the merits of his own platform, will win the nomination without contest.

The plague of self-funders has popped up in the Republican Party as well, to much the same effect. Perhaps the highest-profile Republican self-funder in a Senate race right now is in the one Republicans look most likely to lose—in Pennsylvania. There, Dr. Oz has used his centimillion-dollar fortune to partially self-fund, which helped him eke out a primary win as a vulnerable candidate. Now, polling indicates that he’s on pace to get trounced by Democrat John Fetterman come November.

While most of the heavy self-financing has fallen on the Senate side, it’s also proven meaningful in the House. In Democratic House races as well, self-funders have proliferated. In New York’s 12th District, multimillionaire Carolyn Maloney, who owns a stake in an eviction-happy rental apartment complex, has loaned herself $900,000 to aid in her race against fellow long-tenured New York congressperson Jerry Nadler.

That number pales in comparison to the over $5 million businessman Shri Thanedar has put into the race for Michigan’s 13th District, an open House seat whose Democratic candidate will be decided on today. Thanedar’s massive outlay has kept him neck and neck in that race, despite some of his perceived weaknesses as a candidate. But Thanedar’s massive individual spending has also attracted a profusion of super PAC money in support of his opponents. United Democracy Project, the super PAC of hawkish Israel lobby group AIPAC, has poured upward of $3 million into the race alone; total super PAC spending sums to $5 million, making Michigan's 13th another historically expensive House primary race.

The proliferation of self-funders is not only hugely inefficient in its use of funds, but it has elevated weaker candidates to the disservice of the party’s competitiveness nationwide. For Democrats, the trend has been creeping upward for years, punctuated by the self-funded presidential campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. Steyer spent hundreds of millions of dollars without winning a delegate; Bloomberg spent $1 billion and won only American Samoa. That money could have proved decisive for Democrats in House and Senate races all over the country who struggled in a surprisingly poor down-ballot showing in November 2020.

According to Follow the Money, a money-in-politics watchdog, the raw amount of self-financing has risen dramatically in recent years, and become more widespread within the Democratic Party. In 2018, 12 percent of all candidates self-funded their campaigns, at a cost of $547.5 million, good for 17 percent of all 2018 money raised. Just two years prior in 2016, self-financing accounted for only 4 percent of the money raised by candidates. (Of course, in 2016, the most prominent self-funder was eventual president Donald Trump.)

There’s plenty of reason to expect this trend to get worse. While the trend maps closely to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010, increasing steadily over the subsequent decade, it got another boost with the Supreme Court ruling FEC v. Ted Cruz, decided just this year. In that decision, the court struck down the dollar limit that a campaign can use in funds to pay itself back—thus massively incentivizing candidates to loan money to themselves, since they can now repay themselves with others’ campaign contributions.

While Democrats have supported democratic process reforms that would curtail super PAC spending, and have, in the past, sworn off corporate PAC money, there have been no real attempts to rein in the rise of self-funders. But their presence in Democratic primaries and general elections has been bad for the party, and bad for democracy as well.

The 2022 Democratic primary season has been dominated by super PAC spending, but the rise of self-funding is similarly consequential, forking substantial control of the democratic process over to a handful of wealthy elites. The outcome, effectively, is the same, as the election process gets further and further away from anything relating to a majority of voters. At this rate, someday soon a fortune in the tens of millions will be a practical necessity for any national politician, and we might as well just put the whole government up for sale.

If Democrats are able to overcome the influence of self-funders in winning a handful of crucial seats come November, it’s likely that some version of their dashed democratic process reforms bill would be among the first agenda items resurfaced. But any money-in-politics bill that doesn’t have regulations regarding the self-funded centimillionaire and billionaire class would be woefully inadequate, as the newly empowered donor class moves further and further into the political process.