The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 2.14 Trump Red Scare 2.0 Fears Are Getting Worse & These Greedy Billionaires Are About to Kill Medicare
Episode Date: February 17, 2025Subscribe for New shows every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, & Thursday @ 6pm ET/3pm PST & watch more here: https://youtu.be/7727A-qs3H4?si=Kl9x570McxKS6zxj&list=PLHcsGizlfLMWpSg7i0b9wnUyEZWI-25N3&index=...1&t Go to https://sundaysfordogs.com/phil to get 50% off your first order of Sundays for Dogs! Use code “PHIL” for $20 OFF your first SeatGeek order & returning buyers use code “PDS” for $10 off AND your chance at weekly $500 prizes! https://seatgeek.onelink.me/RrnK/PHIL https://BeautifulBastard.com Get yourself some of our new shirts, crews, and hoodies! copy pasting old ones will lead to an increase of sales and codes being pushed that are no longer active – ✩ TODAY’S STORIES ✩ – 00:00 - A Look at the Last Time a President Purged the Bureaucracy 08:07 - Sponsored by Sundays for Dogs 09:07 - Billionaires’ Successes in Avoiding Medicare Taxes Could Kill the Program 15:44 - The Last Election Cycle Cost $20 Billion, Hitting Records Dark money deep dive: https://youtu.be/d4unF_Tqz4Y?si=83vpYmslos143a6E&t=922 —————————— Produced by: Cory Ray Edited by: James Girardier, Maxwell Enright, Julie Goldberg, Christian Meeks, Matthew Henry Art Department: William Crespo Writing/Research: Philip DeFranco, Brian Espinoza, Lili Stenn, Maddie Crichton, Chris Tolve, Star Pralle, Jared Paolino Associate Producer on Red Scare: Lili Stenn Associate Producer on Medicare: Chris Tolve Associate Producer on Election Spending: Lili Stenn ———————————— For more Philip DeFranco: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-philip-defranco-show/id1278424954 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ESemquRbz6f8XLVywdZ2V Twitter: https://x.com/PhillyD Instagram: https://instagram.com/PhillyDeFranco Newsletter: https://www.dailydip.co TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@philipdefranco?lang=en ———————————— #DeFranco #DonaldTrump #ElonMusk ———————————— Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Is Trump's federal purge the beginning of a Red Scare 2.0? And if so, what are the long-term
risks? Wealthy investors and billionaires are exploiting loopholes that are screwing over
Medicare to the point that it could die. We need to talk about the over $20 billion new
state of play when it comes to money, politics, and elections in the U.S. We're talking about
all that today on your brand new Philip DeFranco show. You daily dive into the
news starting with this. Today is the first President's Day since Donald Trump took office
for the second time. And at around just a month in, he has already implemented countless policies
that will define his legacy and change the landscape of the American political system
forever. Especially when it comes to the administrative state and Trump's ongoing
efforts alongside Elon Musk to dismantle American bureaucracy as we know it. But a big thing
with looking at news now and looking forward is also taking a look back. Because notably,
this is not the first time a president has conducted a mass purge of the bureaucracy.
It actually happened during the Red Scare as well, which is also why we've seen countless
comparisons between the McCarthy era and what we're seeing now. And so with it being President's
Day, I wanted to take a closer look at the past and what it might be able to tell us about the future.
Because in the 1946 midterm elections,
Republicans captured both the House and Senate
after running campaigns centered on anti-communist attacks.
With one of the most notable among their ranks
being Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy,
who would of course go on to be the main perpetrator
of the Red Scare.
And under pressure to act, the following year,
President Harry Truman signed what became known
as the Loyalty Order,
which directed the Civil Service Commission
to screen the background of every federal employee
for evidence of disloyalty.
And those screenings, I mean, they covered everything,
including records across the government,
police departments, past employers,
and even college transcripts.
With Truman also instructing his attorney general
to come up with a list of what he said
were subversive organizations,
that would be a huge red flag for anyone found
to have been a current or former member.
And if anything came up in those screenings,
the FBI would then lead a full-fledged investigation
into the person's life with any possible damaging information going into a file that would be given to the department to have been a current or former member. And if anything came up in those screenings, the FBI would then lead a full fledged investigation
into the person's life with any possible damaging information
going into a file that would be given to the department
that they worked for.
And while hypothetically, the department was given
the ability to decide what to do with the employees,
including discipline or reassignment,
most people who reached that point in those probes,
they lost their jobs.
With seeing examples like a vet who lost both his legs
in World War II being fired
from the Veterans Administration
because he had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party, an anti-Stalinist organization that had been put
on the subversives list.
Also other employees who had been involved
in pro-labor activities faced invasive probes,
as did dozens of black workers who were involved
in civil rights organizations.
Gay and lesbian employees were also probed and purged
as part of a parallel campaign that became known
as the Lavender Scare, which targeted homosexuals
because they were believed to be weak security threats
and communist sympathizers.
And beyond that, these inquiries targeted top experts
on US foreign policy with China,
but a group of academics and foreign service officers
known as the China hands.
And in the late 40s, those experts cautioned the US
from getting too deeply involved in the Chinese civil war.
With the morning that Mao's victory was inevitable
and the US should instead exploit fissures
between him and Russia to counter communist forces
in the region.
And in hindsight, that was probably good advice,
but at the time it was taken as evidence that they were soft on communism and part of a pro communist conspiracy in the region. And in hindsight, that was probably good advice, but at the time it was taken as evidence
that they were soft on communism
and part of a pro-communist conspiracy
within the State Department,
so members of the group were purged.
But it didn't stop there, right?
When Dwight Eisenhower took office in January of 1953,
it marked the first Republican elected president
in two decades, and his administration
continued these efforts in full force.
With the saying, Eisenhower signing an executive order
mere months after taking office,
that launched an even more extensive campaign
to investigate thousands of potential threats in the government. And again,
we saw many gay employees being targeted as part of the order, which defined threats to national
security as constituting, quote, any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously
disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion.
And so all in all, historians have estimated that between 1947 and 1956, over 5 million federal workers were screened
with a total of 2,700 getting fired and 12,000 resigning.
But, and this is a huge key takeaway,
not a single spy was ever discovered
as a result of either Truman or Eisenhower's efforts.
Now with all that, defenders of the effort argued
that it was successful in deterring potential subversives
from joining the government.
But there, you have many historians saying
that it also likely discouraged
many talented people from joining.
And that while also forcing out experts in fields who were crucial to
shaping foreign policy as it related to communist countries and forces at the time. In fact,
according to Clay Rison, a journalist who has expertise in the time period, these purges did
nothing to actually improve America's security. If anything, they actually had the opposite effect.
With him writing that the US effectively kneecapped itself by removing thousands of
valuable employees and forcing those who remained into unhappy conformity at a time of deep geopolitical turmoil.
As well as noting that while it's impossible to know
exactly how big of an impact these purges had,
the cost, quote, was clearly enormous
and played out not just over the subsequent years,
but over decades and going on to explain.
For instance, had expertise not been purged
and dissent not been punished so severely
across the government during the early 1950s,
wiser heads might well have raised the right objections
to America's short-sighted anti-communism in East Asia,
above all, its rush to intervene in Vietnam.
With Risen then asking the key question at hand here,
which is, does the Trump administration run the same risk
of short-sightedness today?
That becomes especially concerning
given the many parallels between the Red Scare
and what we're seeing now.
But as many experts and historians have argued,
DEI has effectively become a stand-in for communism
as a scapegoat used to purge government workers
and shutter entire offices,
in many cases with questionable legality.
This is there also even more explicit one-to-one comparisons
between then and now.
Right, while the Red Scare largely petered out eventually,
there has always been a significant faction
of the American right that continues to weaponize allegations
of communism and socialism as scare tactics
or to rile up their bases.
You know, this is something that we've seen increasingly
more and more with the rise of Trumpism
and the growing polarization between left and right
over the last decade or so.
I mean, you can hardly go on X
without seeing certain Republicans and Elon Musk
decrying some policy as socialist or DEI.
And that's something that's even been emulated
in official government directives.
In the memo that attempted to freeze federal spending,
the Trump administration explicitly said
that it was trying to stop, quote,
the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity,
among other things.
But beyond the obvious parallels, there are also some very notable differences between now and then that make the stakes that it was trying to stop, quote, "'the use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity,' among other things."
But beyond the obvious parallels,
there are also some very notable differences
between now and then that make the stakes
arguably even higher.
And as Rison points out, one important difference
is that loyalty then meant loyalty to the United States.
Today, Trump demands loyalty to himself and his agenda.
And in addition to getting rid of anyone
who threatens his agenda,
Trump is also installing his own loyalists
to run government agencies.
But they're seeing other experts here saying
that this is an explicit attempt
to expand the powers of the presidency
by disrupting nonpartisan civil servants
who provide essential checks on those powers
and replacing them with yes-men who will follow any orders.
We're seeing people like Donald Kettle, for example,
a professor at the University of Maryland
who studies the civil service,
arguing that Trump's purges are, quote,
focus much more on shifting the balance of power
than they are on improving the results of government.
And saying there that taken together,
Trump is demonstrating a blunt assertion
of presidential authority,
which the administration believes
sits above everything else.
And so as a result,
experts say that the impacts of these efforts,
they're gonna go far beyond national security concerns
and geopolitical threats.
In addition to potentially undermining democracy
by centralizing power in the presidency,
these efforts will also hamper our ability
to respond to any future crisis,
be it a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack, anything, period. As Roger Karma, a staff writer at The
Atlantic, explained in a recent article, Trump is committed to dismantling the federal bureaucracy
as we know it, and with it, the government's capacity to handle the next crisis. Like an
individual who chooses to forego health or fire insurance, most Americans won't feel the negative
impact of this effort as long as everything in the world runs smoothly. But with that saying,
what happens when the next crisis strikes is another story altogether. With Karma then specifically
using COVID as an example, arguing that the few successes that the U.S. had in addressing the
pandemic was all thanks to bureaucrats with area-specific expertise who, quote, helps limit
the damage often despite Trump's own negligence and attempts to interfere, and going on to say,
these are exactly the sorts of experienced public servants whom Trump is trying to push out of
government. With him then arguing that if Trump succeeds
and pushes out career experts
while installing his loyalists,
we could be in a world of trouble
when he actually has to face a crisis, right?
Imagine if Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist,
had been in charge of the nation's public health apparatus
and surrounded not by scientific experts,
but by hardcore Trumpists.
But I'm asking, how many more Americans would have died?
And all of this is karma and other experts say
that the steps that Trump is taking now
to gut the American bureaucracy,
it's gonna have a long lasting impact
that's gonna go far beyond just the next four years.
And with that, you know, looking at history,
the impacts of the red scare purges,
they lasted for decades.
With what Trump is doing now, you have many saying,
that's going to surpass the red scare purges in scale.
With Karma here essentially arguing
that we won't notice until it's too late.
Writing at first, most people won't notice
an agency gutted here or a program slashed there, but saying those cuts will make disaster more likely. And when that
disaster strikes, whether during Trump's presidency or his successors, the government will be far less
capable of handling it. And adding here, what we don't know is how bad that crisis will be and
whether Trump will still be in office to face the consequences. But on that uplifting note, that is
where I'm going to end this one. Though, of course, with that, I do want to pass the question off to
you of, you know, what are your thoughts here? You see what's going on now
versus a lot of what we just talked about as being a one-to-one comparison, being parallel or a more
extreme version, or no, the reaction to what we're seeing now, it's overblown. Any and all thoughts,
takes, reactions, I'd love to hear from you in those comments down below. And then, you know,
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And to switch gears into something that I want to deep dive into with you,
let me first start by grossly oversimplifying the American economy for a second.
With that being that most income earners
can roughly be split into two classes.
Those who earn a living by working for a wage or a salary,
and those who primarily live off of interest, dividends,
capital gains, rents, royalties,
and other forms of passive income from investments.
And generally speaking, that first group tends to be
much less wealthy than the second.
Yet for a very long time, Medicare Part A
was funded almost entirely by taxing the first group, but not the second.
Or because Medicare Part A,
which mainly covers inpatient hospital care
for tens of millions of Americans,
it nearly gets all of its funding from the payroll tax.
With that shaving off 2.9% of a worker's paycheck
or 3.8% above a certain income level,
say $250,000 for a married couple.
But if you were an investor in the company
employing that worker,
the income that you raked in from your investments
It wouldn't fall under that tax
And so in 2010 the Democrats in Congress
They finally decided to even the playing field a little bit between the rich and the poor with then President Obama signing an amendment
To the Affordable Care Act that created a brand new tax meant to catch those passive income earners
It's called the net investment income tax and just like the payroll tax
It's objected married couples earning more than two hundred fifty thousand000 a year in investment income to a 3.8% tax.
With both then contributing to the Medicare Part A trust fund that keeps tens of millions of people on health insurance.
At least, that is how it's supposed to work in theory.
But in practice, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that things are a little bit different.
Because while they were negotiating the bill, Democrats inserted a loophole for so-called active business owners.
Basically, people who are not only invested in a business, but actively involved in the day-to-day operations.
With that meant to exempt small business owners,
you know, mom and pop shops, main street grocers,
self-employed professionals and the like.
Then that also meant that if the owners
of enormous corporations could make an argument,
however flimsy that they were also active,
then they may not have to pay the tax.
And that's even if the corporation they're invested in
is a financial institution whose job
is to invest in other entities.
So to put it simply, they are actively involved
in a business making passive income.
And in fact here, when ProPublica combed through reams
of IRS data, they found numerous examples
of wealthy people doing this.
With this including people like
the former professional poker player,
current billionaire, TikTok investor, GOP mega donor,
and 23rd richest man on earth, Jeff Yes.
Right, because you see, he's also the co-founder
of Susquehanna International Group, a giant
investment firm that uses computers to get an edge of mere microseconds over other securities
traders.
Or, to put it in other words, he is exactly the kind of person that Congress had in mind
when they designed the net investment income tax in 2010.
Yet, from 2013, when the tax went into effect, through 2018, Yass reportedly excluded $8.5
of the $9 billion he made in capital gains from the tax.
Was that reportedly saving him more than $300 million that would have otherwise gone towards people's health insurance?
And notably, right, that's just him.
ProPublica also noted two of his firm's partners who reportedly saved a combined $120 million the same way.
Also, here I will say that is just his capital gains, right?
He reportedly excluded hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends and interest from the tax as well.
What we saw is that when ProPublica put these numbers in front of actual tax experts, the outlets said that they
struggled to explain how Yass and his partners could justify not paying the tax. In fact, these
experts reportedly told them that they couldn't think of a legitimate reason why any financiers
making huge profits would be exempt from the tax. But the active business owner thing isn't the only
loophole written into the law. There's also an exemption for capital gains made from the sale
of pass-through businesses,
which again, primarily means smaller firms,
but there are some huge ones
that take advantage of the law.
And so here, for example, Donald Sterling,
he bought the Los Angeles Clippers
for $12.5 million in 1981,
and then sold the NBA team for $2 billion in 2014,
meaning that nearly all of that money
was taxable capital gain.
While he paid income taxes on it,
reportedly he did not pay the net investment income tax,
saving him around $70 million that of course, once again,
would have gone into the healthcare system.
With ProPublica then also finding other similar cases
where four fossil fuel billionaires each saved between 45
and $87 million in taxes after they sold off portions
of their empires.
And all in all, the outlet here identified 17 billionaires
who collectively saved about $1.3 billion in taxes
using these loopholes over six years.
But then you also have to consider that as just the top
sliver of investors, right?
The numbers get way bigger when you include
non-billionaires as well, right?
And there, according to ProPublica, closing the loopholes
would increase tax revenue by an estimated $250 billion
over a decade.
Now with that, you know, some people are gonna go,
well, if the legal arguments that these rich folks
are using to justify their exemption from the law
are absurd, why is nothing happening?
Right, why aren't we seeing the legality here
tested out in court?
Well, in there, you have reports saying,
well, the IRS is just simply too underfunded
and understaffed to pursue audits of all these investors
and go to war with their teams of lawyers.
Now with that, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act
sought to restore some of the agency's teeth
by giving it more money to hire thousands of new agents.
But with now Donald Trump in the White House
and Republican Congress backing him,
you have people saying it is gonna go
the complete other way,
which some say could then ultimately put
the financial solvency of Medicare in jeopardy.
Because the trust fund that Medicare Part A draws from
only contains so much money.
And when expenses start to outstrip revenues,
which is projected to happen by 2030,
the program has to dip into those reserves.
And then if that keeps up year after year
and the reserves run dry,
which is projected to happen in 2036,
Medicare won't be able to pay out people's full benefits.
And so by not paying the net investment income tax, these wealthy investors aren't just straining the government's budget, but they are actively speeding up Medicare's decline.
And the thing is, it appears it wouldn't even take all that much to bring the Part A trust fund back into balance over the long term.
In fact, according to Medicare trustees who make these projections, simply raising the payroll tax from 2.9% to 3.25%, or cutting expenses by 8% would do the trick.
And that's without even touching
the net investment income tax
or a host of other economic factors
that influence the program's revenues and expenses.
But what I will say here is that instead of doing that,
what we're seeing is that Trump has proposed policies
that critics say would dramatically tighten
the financial squeeze on Medicare
and other entitlement programs.
Most notably here, we're talking about eliminating
the tax on social security benefits
that all but the poorest recipients pay,
which according to the nonpartisan committee
for a responsible federal budget
would cut $1.6 trillion from social security
and Medicare over nearly a decade.
If that estimate is correct,
Medicare would run out of money in 2030,
six years ahead of current projections.
And that's also without considering the potential impact
of any of Donald Trump's other proposals,
things like ending taxes on tips and overtime,
yanking up those tariffs,
and deporting undocumented immigrants
who pay into the system but don't receive benefits back.
All of which, according to Forbes,
would add approximately $2.3 trillion
to Social Security's deficit and deplete its fund by 2031.
But even assuming Medicare or Social Security
become insolvent, that wouldn't make them unsalvageable.
Right, Congress could still restore their balance sheets
or just take preventative action
before they ever get to that point.
And this is both programs are extremely popular
among the general public, even with Republicans.
So it's possible that if people losing their benefits
becomes a real near-term prospect,
the political pressure might become too great
for politicians to let it happen,
which is partly why,
even though Medicare has come within a decade of insolvency
many times since the 1990s,
the government's consistently kept it afloat.
But that doesn't mean that they can't chip away
at its foundation as they already have been
for just as long.
And so amidst all the other headline grabbing chaos
and political drama we may or may not see
over the next several years,
you may wanna keep your eyes peeled for this issue.
And then, you know, since it's President's Day,
I wanted to also share with y'all a piece
that I recorded during our holiday break
that I never actually got around to putting out.
But because it's about just how much money was dropped
on last year's election,
I think it's very important to talk about
on a day like today.
Especially as we think about future elections,
future Congress people, and future presidents.
We all know that elections in America are very expensive,
but the details are insane.
Starting with the top surface level fact
that the 2023-2024 election cycle
costs more than $20 billion.
Right, that is the combined total
that was spent
on both federal and state elections,
according to a new analysis by the campaign finance
tracking nonprofit, Open Secrets.
And regardless of how you feel about the outcome
of the presidential election or really any of the races,
this is an astronomical number,
and one that shattered many records.
But also with everything now said and done,
I think it's important to take a deeper look
at those numbers and who the money came from,
where it was spent, how it influenced various contests,
and the numerous records that were broken.
So let's break it down.
Starting with first, the nonprofit finding
of the vast majority of money that was poured
into the election was spent on federal races,
which raked in around $16 billion.
Then the other $4 billion being raised by state candidates,
party committees, and ballot measure committees
in all 50 states.
But this also, as big money does not always mean big wins.
I mean, just look at the presidential race. Kamala Harris's campaign and outside groups outraised
Donald Trump by hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, according to the most recent Federal
Elections Commission filings, Harris's campaign raised over a billion dollars through mid-October,
and that's almost three times the nearly 382 million that Trump's campaign raised in the
same period. Then also, very notably, that was just the money being brought in by the campaigns.
The dollar amounts raised by groups outside the campaigns,
like Super PACs, were actually much closer.
With outside groups supporting Trump
or attacking his opponents,
reporting about a billion dollars in spending,
while groups that were backing Harris or opposing Trump
reported spending 1.05 billion.
Then also beyond that,
there was a significant discrepancy
between Trump and Harris when it came to donations
from the ultra rich mega donors
that have an oversized influence on our elections.
Right there, unsurprisingly,
Donald Trump got way more of those donations.
In fact, around 44% of all the money raised to support Trump
came from just 10 individual donors.
Whereas comparatively, the top 10 donors to elect Harris
only made up around 8% of total contributions,
both to her campaign and outside groups.
With Harris pulling in around $126 million
from her top 10 donors,
which is actually less than Donald Trump got
from his biggest donor alone. But what's also wild is that the total donations million from her top 10 donors, which is actually less than Donald Trump got from his biggest donor alone.
But what's also wild is that the total donations
that Trump got from mega donors,
it could actually be even bigger
as the final disclosures are filed with the FEC.
And that's already something we're seeing
with recent filings from December showing
that Elon Musk actually contributed way more money
to elect Donald Trump than previously known.
With it being revealed that Elon Musk spent $260 million
on outside groups for Trump,
which would mean that Elon Musk single-handedly accounted
for more than a quarter of all the money outside groups spent
getting Trump elected,
which is just objectively a fucking wild figure.
It's also notably more than double the 118 million
open secrets had recorded
before this most recent disclosure.
With that new data officially making Musk
the single biggest individual donor
in the 2024 election cycle by a long shot.
But again, it wasn't just the presidential election
that saw enormous amounts of money in circulation. Spending on federal
elections as a whole also broke several already ridiculous records as billions of dollars were
poured into the hotly contested House and Senate races that helped give Republicans narrow
majorities in both chambers. I mean, one of the records that was broken was the totally unprecedented
$4.5 billion spent by PACs and other independent groups outside individual candidate campaigns. And when I say totally unprecedented,
I mean, that is over $1 billion more
than the previous record of 3.3 billion in 2020.
And again, these are numbers that could also grow
as the final filings roll in.
Now with that, as far as how that insane amount
of money was spent, the analysis found that the bulk of it
went to independent expenditures,
right, which are the funds that outside groups spend
advocating for candidates with things like constant ads
that you'd see on TV or the bajillion mailers
that you'd get in your mailbox.
And the reason why so much was spent
on independent expenditures is because there is no cap
on the amount of money that individual donors,
organizations, unions, and other groups can give
to those efforts.
Now with that, as far as the breakdown here
along party lines, conservative PACs outspent liberal ones
by 2.2 billion to 1.7 billion,
though the single biggest spender among outside groups
was actually the Democratic hybrid PAC, Future Forward USA,
which spent $517 million.
Though most of that was channeled to the presidential race,
not congressional contests.
And this, while on the conservative side,
their biggest outside spender
was the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC,
which spent over $364 million on Trump.
And kind of an interesting aside here,
the majority of MAGA PAC money, over $251 million,
that was spent on attack ads opposing Harris and Biden,
with just a quarter of that amount, around $58 million,
actually going to support Trump.
But on the note of outside spending at large,
it wasn't just the presidential candidates
that sucked up a disproportionate amount of those funds.
Right, of the $2 billion these groups put
towards congressional races, more than a quarter of that
went to just three Senate elections.
With over $714 million going to the seats in Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Montana,
all of which were flipped by Republicans.
But then also, unprecedented outside spending,
it's not the only wild record
that was broken in this cycle.
We also saw a historic amount of dark money contributions,
which is when money is spent to influence elections,
but the source of that funding is kept secret.
Because while super PACs are required
to disclose their donors,
certain kinds of nonprofits and shell companies,
they don't have to.
So this essentially creates a loophole
where donors will give funds to dark money groups,
which then turn around and give those dollars to PACs,
allowing the original donors to remain anonymous.
And if that sounds familiar,
it's because we actually did a whole separate deep dive
on that a little while back.
I'll link to it down below.
But as we talked about in that story,
there has been a massive increase
in this kind of spending year after year since the 2010 Citizens United rule,
because that reversed centuries of campaign finance rules
and paved the way for corporate interests
to have an outsized role in our elections.
And according to Open Secrets,
the 2024 election cycle followed the same trend
with dark money contributions topping over a billion dollars
for the first time ever,
crushing the previous record of $734 million in 2020.
And with that, we also saw the continuation of another trend that we talked about
in that dark money deep dive,
and that is that a large chunk
of these shady contributions actually went to Democrats.
Right, and this, despite the fact
that people often associate the support
for Citizens United and dark money
with conservatives in opposition with liberals.
In fact, I mean, Harris herself
also railed against these groups in the past.
And while Open Secrets didn't say
if dark money contributions to Democrats
outpaced those of Republicans
as they have in the last three election cycles,
it did provide some insight.
For example, filing showing that super PACs
for Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress
received more than $250 million
from the four main dark money groups
that they're allied with,
and saying of that, the majority, 62%, went to Democrats.
But also with this, we need to touch on spending
in state elections also hitting historic highs.
For example, Open Secrets projecting
that dollars put into state contest
will hit a record of $4.6 billion.
And specifically, they predicted that once all is said
and done, state level candidates will have raised
$2.6 billion for the 2024 cycle,
which is a notable 22% increase from 2020.
Though unlike some of the federal trends,
Republican candidates are expected to out-raise Democrats
by 1.3 billion to 1.1 billion.
Which is also interesting because it marks a reversal
from 2020 when Democrats raised more than GOP candidates.
So that said, it's also not uncommon for the parties
to take turns topping each other in overall funds.
But what is really stand out and unique
about these state numbers is the amount spent
on ballot measures.
With the seeing that Open Secrets is estimating
that the total dollar figure across all 50 states,
that that'll reach $1.4 billion.
And unsurprisingly here,
a big chunk of that was spent on abortion and reproductive rights measures, which were actually
on the ballot in 10 states. And according to the nonprofit, as of November 1st, abortion measures
made up almost a third of all money raised by ballot measure committees this cycle. The committee
is supporting abortion access, massively outraising those opposed to it by $305 million to $96 million.
But then also beyond abortion, contributions both for and against various initiatives
broke several spending records in different states.
With actually the most expensive ballot initiative
of the entire election cycle being the effort
to legalize recreational marijuana in Florida.
With that racking up over $179 million,
which is literally more than every other
marijuana-related measure combined.
And while $153 million of that money was spent
by the committee supporting legalization,
the measure failed to pass.
So that also because it needed more than a majority vote.
If Florida requires their ballot initiatives
to get 60% of the vote to pass,
which is also why we saw the state's abortion protection
measure failing as well.
And so with all that, as we're in the aftermath,
very interesting information about the state
of our kind of political economy
and the enormous role that money plays in it.
But also I think it's important to look at these things
because it helps us kind of look towards the trends
of what we may see in the upcoming midterms
and the elections after.
With that, my friends,
is the end of your Monday dive into the news.
And remember, while today's show is pre-shot
because it's President's Day,
I got three more shows for you this week,
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 6 p.m. Eastern,
3 p.m. Pacific.
Thank you for watching.
I love your faces,
and I'll see you right back here tomorrow.