Analysts at the public interest group Open Secrets estimated, just before Election Day, that total campaign spending for state and federal elections in 2022 will hit $16.7 billion, well above the $14 billion spent on the 2018 midterms. Some 38 percent of that total will come from the top 1 percent of donors, with 15.4 percent just from billionaires alone, up from 11.9 percent in 2020.
Billionaires tend to invest their billions strategically. Take the Ohio Senate race, where venture capitalist and author J.D. Vance pocketed $15 million early on from his billionaire investor former boss Peter Thiel. Those millions won Vance the GOP primary, but the fledgling candidate soon found himself struggling in the general election campaign against veteran Rep. Tim Ryan. To the rescue came assorted Super PACs tied to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell’s wealthy underwriters ended up “propping up” Vance, Mother Jones notes, with over another $30 million. A candidate seeking to represent people of modest means would have to pick up 1.2 million campaign contribution checks averaging $25 each to offset $30 million.
In Ohio and eight other states, McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund super PAC spent over $205 million on advertising blitzes, becoming, according to the ad tracker AdImpact, the “highest-spending advertiser” in campaign history. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee tied to the House Republican leadership, has spent over $188.1 million.
To remain competitive in this sort of environment, Democrats like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer have been cultivating their own “dark money” pools of campaign cash. This sort of reliance on the friendly financially favored has consequences. Dollars from deep pockets amount to a political “wet blanket.” They dampen candidate enthusiasm for any proposals that might actually discomfort people of awesome means.
This hesitance to confront the rich, in turn, leaves people of modest means feeling realdiscomfort as grand fortunes continue to grow at their expense. And all these dynamics keep a vicious political cycle spinning. Proposals that would excite modest-income voters — proposals that openly challenge the lockgrip the super rich hold over so much of our daily lives — get little traction within the Democratic Party hierarchy simply because these proposals might frighten off the potential rich donors the party needs to compete.
The resulting frustrations with everyday life’s continuing squeezes leave many Americans of modest means vulnerable to the Trumps of our world — and worse — who blame those squeezes on society’s out groups.
In this difficult political environment, we do our best to battle the Trumpistas. We rightfully celebrate our victories against them. But the vicious cycle only keeps spinning when these victories leave so many millions of Americans still feeling squeezed. A Donald Trump might fall, a Ron DeSantis waits in the wings.
The best way out of this cycle: taking the rich on directly. Progressives in Massachusetts have just shown the way. On Election Day, their campaign to undo the notorious flat tax in their state constitution and put in place a stiff new levy on the state’s richest won a convincing 52-48 percent victory.
This triumph — won in the face of a massive opposition misinformation campaign — will levy an income surtax of 4 percent on annual individual income above $1 million. The revenue resulting from this new Massachusetts “Fair Share Amendment” will go toward boosting public education and transportation.
The state’s top 1 percent, under current law, have been paying only 6.8 percent of their average $2.4-million annual incomes in state and local taxes. The Fair Share Amendment’s Election Day victory will up that rate to an average 8.7 percent and raise, notes the Fair Share campaign, $2 billion a year in new revenue
“We’ve done,” the Fair Share campaign’s Jeron Mariani noted on Election Day’s day after, “what some thought was impossible: passed the Fair Share Amendment to create a permanently fairer tax system and deliver billions of dollars in new revenue for our public schools, colleges, roads, bridges, and transit systems.”
On that same day, just coincidentally, analysts at the data company Wealth-X releasedtheir latest World Ultra Wealth Report. The United States, the report details, now hosts more “ultra high net worth individuals” — deep pockets worth at least $30 million — “than the next five highest-ranked countries combined.”
These 121,465 U.S. ultras make up nearly a third of the world’s super wealthy. By getting serious about challenging these rich, we can improve all our lives. Let efforts like the triumph in Massachusetts light the way.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.
Sam Pizzigati | Radio Free (2022-11-14T06:58:41+00:00) Election 2022’s Grandest Victors?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/14/election-2022s-grandest-victors/
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