What A Day - How Dark Money Is Funding The Midterms

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

The midterms are just around the corner, and that means you’re probably seeing more political ads than ever in your mailbox and on your screens. But who’s funding those ads… and the campaigns they’re supporting? Jane speaks with Judd Legum, a contributor to the The Guardian newsletter How We Win, about dark money and the forces shaping our politics.Show Notes: Subscribe to How We Win — https://www.theguardian.com/hwwjl Check out Judd’s Substack, Popular Information — https://popular.info/  Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

There are candidates who come out and say, I don't want any super PAC funding supporting my campaign. Oftentimes, those wishes, that desire is ignored. And the money comes in anyway. And I think it's reasonable to question, was that really sincere? Or were they just saying that because it sounds good? It's Thursday, October 15th. I'm Jane Koston. And this is what a day.

Hey, remember how President Donald Trump said he'd be paying for his magnificent White House ballroom? No. Well, here he is last year in the Oval Office. This is an interior shot of the ballroom. I think there'll be nothing like it. And it's being paid for 100% by me and some friends of mine donors to it. The government's paying absolutely nothing. Me and some friends of mine.

Hmm. But according to a new report from the Washington Post, a list of the major donors does not include Trump. Wild! There are some other familiar names like tech companies, Apple, and NVIDIA, which both donated $25 million. While the Post doesn't say these donations resulted in any special treatment from the Trump administration, a lot of them came from people or companies that had business with the government. What are the chances? Trump said today that the Pentagon will no longer live stream the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter.

Sorry, Secretary of War Slash little boy Pete Heggseth. Going to have to cancel that execution party I know you were so looking forward to. Trump wrote in a true social post that publicly airing the execution, quote, might have been a strong deterrent for the world to witness how America deals with terrorists and scum, like the shooter. But he continued, quote, many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die through streaming or through any other visual device. You don't say. Ukraine attacked a Russian oil refinery today, abandoning a brief truce involving energy-related targets that it said Moscow did not heed.

Trump said Sunday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to a, quote, energy ceasefire with no real information behind it. Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky said that while his country welcome, the announcement, Russia was still hitting energy infrastructure in Kiev, which doesn't sound like much of a ceasefire to me. The Kremlin also said Thursday that Ukraine never stopped its strikes on refineries that have hurt Russia. According to the Associated Press, it wasn't possible to independently verify either side's claims. Ukraine's strike could further complicate Kiev's relationship with Trump, which has soured again with Trump demanding Zelensky be replaced. But I want to talk about money.

namely, the money pouring into political campaigns that make the insane ads that make our politics worse and drive us all insane. Joining me is Jud Legham, author of Popular Information and Independent Newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism. He's one of the writers contributing to the Guardian's new 12-week newsletter, How We Win. Judd, welcome back to Wadaday. Thanks for having me. So in your upcoming piece for The Guardian series on How We Win and basically how we fight, back against Trumpism, you write that the money spent on elections jumped from $3.8 billion in 2014 to $8.9 billion by 2022, and it will likely break that record this year. Now, is this just

more money? More people putting more money in, more people donating, more people spending, or is the way it's being spent changing? I think it's both. I think probably a lot of the early expansion was due to this the internet and grassroots fundraising making it a lot easier for people to donate $5 or $10. But since then we've seen billionaires, the very top level on the income scale, start donating unprecedented amounts. There's a recent report in New York Times. Elon Musk is planning to spend over or has already donated. over $300 million more than he did in the 2024 presidential election for this midterms. So when you layer those two things on top of each other, you're getting a lot more money,

and it's being spent increasingly in opaque ways, whereas before most of the money was spent either through the committees themselves, the campaigns themselves, or the political parties. Now, in most hotly contested elections, you'll see way more money being spent through super PACs and nonprofits. Now, I'm sure that we've talked about this on the show before, but what is dark money specifically? And why has it grown so quickly? Narrow definition of dark money is the money that's spent on politics that can't be traced. for a while, this was kind of synonymous with soft money where it would be not able to be traced and funneled through parties. Since a couple of recent Supreme Court decisions, you've now had much of it flow through super PACs, but if you donate directly to a super PAC, you have to disclose who you are.

If you donate to a nonprofit, that group can take your money and then donate it to the super PAC and then know what he knows who donated the money. There's also the term, which is not very helpful, functionally dark money. What does that mean? And how much of the spending we're talking about would you say is functionally dark? I would say that almost all of the money that's being spent on super PACs, packs with names like, pine tree pack or no going back pack that people are seeing and their mailboxes on their TV screens is all functionally dark because nobody knows how that money is being spent. You can go to the FEC website.

You can look it up. You can sort the, you download it into a spreadsheet, sort the columns, figure out who the biggest donors are. You can do all that. How many voters are doing that? pretty much no voters. So for them, they're getting this information. A lot of it is very misleading. I think if you look at the messages of the TV ads and the mailers that are being set out during this midterms, I mean, just outrageous claims of people supporting mandatory sex change operations for children

and jailing their parents if they don't do those things, letting violent prisoners out onto the streets, things that any one of which would have been this huge scandal that someone would make these accusations in previous elections. Now it's just commonplace. We don't know, you know, people have no idea who's behind those ads. So you write about how most of the dark and functionally dark money coming from super PACs funded by billionaire such as Elon,

and corporate interests. A lot of that is coming from the AI and the crypto industries. So here's my question. What does the AI industry and the crypto industry want from the Republican Party and from Trump and Christian Gillibrand as a Democrat who's highly supportive of the crypto industry? It seems like they've already gotten everything that they want. So what else do they want over the next two years? Well, they want a lot more. We just had this debate over the Clarity Act, which was the crypto industry's big bill. They want regulations that essentially bless all of the things that they do. They really want to get more into the banking industry and be able to replace at least to some degree traditional banks. And the AI industry wants that too.

You know, they want that regulatory certainty. They're facing a lot of potential litigation risk, right? You know, people are using these AI tools. They're telling them to do all kinds of things. Some of them might be advisable. Some of them might not be advisable. And they would like some protection. So they're looking for that.

And for the most part, you know, they're supporting Republicans. But as you mentioned, there's a fair number of Democrats who are on board with giving them what they want from a regulatory perspective. And they're pouring in millions, really when you count both the companies and their founders billions of dollars to try to get the people they want in power. We'll get back to my conversation with Jud Legum in a moment. What a Day is brought to you by Delete Me. It's October and that means it's everyone's face. time of year. Cybersecurity awareness month. And there has never been a better time to focus on cybersecurity. Did you know over $3.5 billion with a B? Was losses scams last year in the U.S.?

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issue you write is a bipartisan problem, though obviously the GOP. and Trump are spending way more money, like astronomical amounts of money. How should voters weigh the fact that, as you note, both sides do it? I think that it's very difficult because there are candidates who come out and say, I don't want any super PAC funding supporting my campaign. it oftentimes those, those wishes, that desire is ignored and the money comes in anyway. And I think it's reasonable to question, was that really sincere or were they just saying that because it sounds good? So you could say, well, I'm only going to support candidates that, you know, reject this dark and functionally dark money.

But that's, that's difficult. I think as voters, you have to, unfortunately, try to sort through this toxic soup of messages, try to figure out what's true and make the best decision you can on what candidate supports, you know, is aligned with your values. How does super PAC money change our politics besides how people vote? How does it change who gets to run and what they do if and when they get into office? I think it changes things fundamentally because what you have. is a very small number of people who have a huge impact on whether or not individual politicians

have the resources they need to get elected. When you look at the MAGA Inc. filings, President Trump's Super PAC, every time they put one out, usually monthly now, and you see a donation for over a million dollars, you could look up that person and nine times out of Ted, they've either gotten something very recently that's very valuable from the White House or they're looking for something. And this also is going to apply to whether the Democrats or Republicans win these close Senate elections. They're also going to have people who made a big difference in getting them into office. And my guess is they'll get their phone calls answered. So greater disclosure of this kind of money has bipartisan support. People want to know who is putting so much money into our elections. So why hasn't it actually happened?

Good question. I think the reality is that the people who are currently in office benefited from the current system. So those are not the people who are eager to upset the apple cart and change. the system. But we have seen there's been academic studies, and there's a few states that have implemented this, that when you require disclosure of these outside groups, we require them to disclose, you know, who are your top five donors, and you put that right on the message, on the TV ad, on the mailer, it makes those communications much less effective with voters. And in my view, that would be a good thing. Judd, before we go, I have to ask you about something else because you've been very busy. You are also the author of the popular substack, popular information.

And this week, you've been busy trying to figure out if White House press secretary, Katie Zachariah, is a lawyer. I learned that apparently lawyer doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Where are we right now with Katie Zachariah's background? And whether or not she is actually the attorney that. that she claimed to be. I mean, she was a general counsel for Rick Grinnell's group Fix California. How can you be a general counsel if you can't practice law? You really can't. And that's why she's now had a bar complaint filed against her with the California bar. And I think, you know, this, earlier this week, I did publish that I'd looked at all 50

states, couldn't find any evidence that she was a lawyer. I think, now we know definitively she is not a lawyer or an attorney. She's never been licensed to practice law. And in addition to some of her, you know, the legal issues that arise out of that, you can look back and see that she's been on TV for years now, at least since 2022, repeatedly credentialing herself as a practicing attorney. So not the best start for a new White House press secretary. Yeah. I'm also curious because she. has this past with Rick Grinnell, I know best for helping Andrew Tate get back into the country, but also on the board of a group that supports offering the death penalty for women who have abortions. What are you going to continue to be looking into with regard to Zachariah and other members of this administration?

It just feels as if like the level of vetting going into any of this, it wasn't great to begin with in 2024. 2025, but it just seems to have gotten worse. Yeah, I think there's a lot to look into with her life. One of the things actually, Wired, just put out a story that she was a multi-level marketer for a period of time after returning from China. That was something I was looking into, but they seem to have gotten me to it. But I think that, yes, this is somebody who was not well-known, and many of the people who are being put into positions of they're very influential, very close to the president,

are not well known, and understanding who they are, what motivates them, what their priorities are, what their history are is, I think is very important. And it is definitely something I'm going to be continued to be focused on. I have to ask, she does have a job to do. And whether or not she's good at being press secretary doesn't really bother me, because that's fine. But how will all of this impact her ability to do the job of being White House press secretary? Yeah, it's going to make it difficult. She doesn't seem to want to answer questions about her past and what she's been doing. And her job is to talk to the press.

So the combination of those two things of not wanting to answer questions about yourself and being required. And in fact, your entire professional life has revolved around. communicating with the press, I think it's quite difficult. Judd, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Jane. That was my conversation with Jud Legum, author of popular information, and contributing writer to the Guardian's news series, How We Went. You can subscribe to both newsletters in the show notes.

Before we go, you know Stacey Abrams as a trusted voting rights advocate and activist. Each week in her podcast, Assembly Required, she explores actionable steps to fight fascism. This week, she sat down with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, authors of End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. Together, they unpack and dissect this new brand fascism we're dealing with today and discuss how fascism can be stopped. New episodes of Assembly Required drop every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts.

That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Does Trump know who he is? and tell your friends to listen. And if you are into reading, and not just about our great president's comments from Alaska yesterday. Well, look, I have to make deals with people, so I don't go around calling them names.

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