Vice President-elect JD Vance and Republican committees asked the Supreme Court to overturn federal limits that restrict political parties from coordinating spending with candidates on the grounds that they violate the First Amendment.
Limits on contributions to candidates are much lower than they are to party committees such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which are also plaintiffs along with former Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio).
“A political party exists to get its candidates elected. Yet Congress has severely restricted how much parties can spend on their own campaign advertising if done in cooperation with those very candidates,” the plaintiffs wrote in the petition
made public Friday.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) declined to comment on litigation.
While a candidate can only accept $3,300 per person per election
during the 2024 cycle, the NRSC could take in as much as $578,200 from a single donor per cycle.
Limits on how much spending party committees can coordinate with candidates were originally set in part to guard against corruption and outsized influence from a small group of wealthy individuals.
The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in September ruled against Vance and the party committees, but only because the Supreme Court never overturned a 2001 decision upholding the limits.
“Even when the Supreme Court embraces a new line of reasoning in a given area and even when that reasoning allegedly undercuts the foundation of a decision, it remains the Court’s job, not ours, to overrule it,” Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote at the time
.
The plaintiffs urged the court to take up the case and overturn the decision, arguing the limits are an affront to the First Amendment rights of political parties and candidates.
“And that constitutional violation has harmed our political system by leading donors to send their funds elsewhere, fueling ‘the rise of narrowly focused “super PACs”‘ and an attendant ‘fall of political parties’ power’ in the political marketplace, which has contributed to a spike in political polarization and fragmentation across the board,” the plaintiffs wrote.
New campaign finance disclosures filed late Thursday and early Friday shed fresh light on how big money, big donors and big expectations shaped the final stretch of the 2024 presidential race.
That didn’t happen in the 2024 presidential race, even as President Biden and Vice President Harris’s campaign raised more money than any other presidential ticket in history.
That’s at least in part because President-elect Trump outsourced his canvassing operation to super PACs funded by wealthy allies, including several billionaires who have been selected to serve
in his incoming administration.
Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars boosting Trump since July
Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect the incoming president since he endorsed
Trump in July following an assassination attempt.
New filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show Musk gave a total of $238.5 million
to his pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, which led the charge to turn out voters in battleground states.
Recent filings also revealed a combined $23.5 million he contributed to two other super PACs supporting Trump.
Super PACs, unlike campaigns, can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money. While they are legally not allowed to coordinate with campaigns, the FEC this spring relaxed coordination rules on canvassing specifically in response to a request
brought by a Democratic committee.
Trump took a gamble on outsourcing his ground game
to super PACs including America PAC. It not only appears to have paid off for him, but also for
Musk, who will co-lead
his Department of Government Efficiency effort to cut federal spending and reduce the size of the federal government.
The Elon Musk Revocable Trust also gave $20.5 million
on Oct. 25 to RBG PAC, a “pop up” super PAC that spent nearly that much on digital media defending Trump’s abortion stance in battleground states.
The super PAC, which appears to reference the late Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, formed on Oct. 16, the day final reports were due to the FEC before the election. Because of the timing of its formation and the donation, the source of the money being spent by RBG PAC was not made public until 30 days after the election.
Ginsburg’s granddaughter Clara Spera previously publicly condemned
the “appalling” ads, telling the Washington Post that RBG PAC “has no connection to the Ginsburg family and is an affront to my late grandmother’s legacy.”
New filings also show Musk donated $3 million
to the MAHA Alliance, a super PAC that ran ads in swing states urging supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to support Trump. Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race in August and endorsed Trump, and MAHA is a reference to his “Make America Healthy Again” tagline.
Several Trump administration picks cut big checks to super PAC
Musk isn’t the only wealthy individual who spent big to boost Trump in the 2024 election, with many snagging key posts
in the incoming administration.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick to lead the Commerce Department and the CEO of the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, made a nearly $3 million “in-kind” donations of stock
to the primary pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. (MAGA Inc.), according to its Thursday evening filing with the FEC.
That’s in addition to the combined $6 million Lutnick has contributed to MAGA Inc. between December 2023 and August 2024, according to FEC records.
Several other billionaire Trump administration nominees donated more than $1 million to MAGA Inc. throughout the 2024 election cycle, including Treasury secretary nominee
Scott Bessent, the founder of the Key Square Group investment firm who donated
a total of $1 million; former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who gave nearly $2 million and was tapped
by Trump to serve as administrator of the Small Business Administration; and Linda McMahon, Trump’s education secretary pick
, who donated nearly $20.3 million
Harris campaign reports no debt amid scrutiny
In the aftermath of a disappointing election for Democrats, Harris’s campaign quickly received scrutiny over how her campaign blew through more than a $1 billion only to lose all seven battleground states.
News outlets noted that her campaign appeared to be in debt, which her campaign insisted it was not.
While the Harris campaign came under fire for potential debt as an intraparty blame game
broke out, it’s not uncommon for presidential candidates to have debt after an election.
Trump’s own campaign reported nearly $11.4 million
in debts and obligations to the FEC as of Nov. 25. His unsuccessful 2020 campaign reported more than $11.3 million
in debts and obligations after the election.
The primary pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward, however, reported $47 million in debts and obligations as of Nov. 25. An aide to the super PAC told the New York Times
that the large debt was due to an accounting issue with invoice timing.
MAGA Inc., on the other hand, had $0 in debts and obligations.
Money doesn’t always win
The Harris campaign reported raising nearly $1.2 billion
as of Nov. 25, blowing past President Biden’s record-breaking 2020 haul of nearly $1.1 billion
through the same period.
Around $312.3 million
of the 2024 total was raised through the end of June, just before Biden left the ticket following his disastrous debate performance and endorsed Harris as his successor. The campaign reported just $1.8 million on hand as of Nov. 25.
The Trump campaign raised $477.1 million during the 2024 election and still had nearly $9.9 million
in cash on hand as of Nov. 25, according to an FEC report filed Thursday.
His campaign spent $462.4 million throughout the 2024 election, an astronomical sum that was nevertheless dwarfed by the Harris campaign’s spending.
The fallout from Harris’s loss and her campaign spending — which included an eyebrow-raising $1 million
payment to Oprah Winfrey’s production company — rankled some within the Democratic ranks.
Her loss kicked off a Democratic reckoning
that is searching for answers about who or what was ultimately responsible for the party’s loss during the 2024 election.
After Trump was declared the winner, Democratic National Committee (DNC) official Lindy Li took to cable news to declare
Harris’s White House bid a “$1 billion disaster” and that donors were “misled” about her ability to actually win.
Political polls showed the race within the margin of error, and Harris raised enormous sums of money when she took over at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Her entrance seemed to re-energize the base, though Harris had enormous task ahead of her: reintroducing herself to millions of Americans just years after running in the 2020 presidential primary and persuading voters to choose her within a matter of months.
Democrats concede now that they have a brand and messaging problem, as voters ranked the economy as the second most important issue (32 percent) after democracy (34 percent), according to CNN exit polling
.
Scrutiny over how the Harris campaign managed its finances comes just less than two months before members of the party pick their next DNC chair
.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help propel President-elect Trump back into the White House, the latest reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show.
Throughout the 2024 election cycle, the Tesla and SpaceX executive donated nearly $239 million, including in-kind contributions, to America PAC, a super PAC that backed Trump’s Oval Office bid, according to FEC reports filed Thursday night.
That includes three $25 million contributions in the last two weeks of October, the records showed.
The outside group, which was registered with the FEC in late May, spent large amounts on get-out-the-vote initiatives, direct mail, digital advertising and canvassing. The Super PAC ran the controversial campaign of dishing out $1 million donations to Trump backers in the seven battleground states who signed its petition. The initiative was scrutinized in public and in courts with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner suing the PAC in October in hopes of stopping the giveaway.
Each of the $1 million donation winners was listed as payments for “spokesperson consultant” by America PAC, according to FEC filings. In total, Musk spent more than $40 million on the checks.
While the majority of Musk’s public donations were steered toward America PAC, the SpaceX CEO funded another Super PAC that looked to moderate Trump’s stance on abortion.
RBG PAC, which was registered with the FEC on Oct. 16, did not disclose its donors before the 2024 general election. But the latest filing showed that Musk was its sole funder, giving $20.5 million through his Elon Musk Revocable Trust based in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 24.
The outside group, named after the late liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, suggested Trump and the late justice seemingly agreed on opposing a national abortion ban. The group’s site features Trump’s Oct. 1 post on the social platform X where he vowed to veto a national abortion ban if it came his way.
“Why did Ruth Bader Ginsburg agree with Donald Trump’s position on abortion? Because RBG believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate our abortion laws. Donald Trump also does not support a federal ban on abortion,” the group wrote on its website
.
The outside group ran abortion-focused ads
and spent the funds on text messages, mailers and digital advertising, FEC reports showed.
The tech tycoon also supported the Super PAC MAHA Alliance, standing for “Make America Healthy Again,” which is tied to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The group received $3 million from Musk on Oct. 22, according to FEC filings. The outside group attempted to convince Kennedy supporters to vote for Trump following the independent presidential candidate’s exit from the race.
With more FEC reports to be filed by Super PACs and other politically active groups, it is possible that Musk has given even more money to efforts backing Trump.
According to FEC filings, Musk was one of Trump’s biggest donors in this year’s election cycle.
After the conclusion of the election, Musk has been a frequent guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, joining his calls with world leaders
and, at times, weighing on the president-elect’s choices of nominees and appointees.
Shortly after Trump’s win against Vice President Harris, Trump tapped Musk, along with his former 2024 GOP primary rival, Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead the newly formed
Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory board focused on cutting government spending.
Democratic strategist James Carville
called President Biden the “most tragic figure in modern American politics,” criticizing the president for his decision to remove himself from the presidential election so late in the race.
Carville blamed the historic dropout for Vice President Harris’s loss.
“The different scenario would be, if he would have — in September of 2023 or August — said that he wasn’t going to run. Goddamn, we would have won this election,” he said on the latest episode of his podcast, “Politics War Room.”
“And it wouldn’t have been that close because we would have had so many frickin’ talented people that were running and he would be sitting here right now getting ready to leave on a high note, they would be naming commissions to figure out what are we going to name after him.”
He added that Biden “knows he f—ed up” and would have been “the toast of Washington” had he made different choices.
The strategist was seen as a predominant voice
in calling for the sitting president to step down during the election, although it transformed him into “the person [he’s] always hated.”
Newly elected chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) weighed in on Democrats’ future strategy, saying the party needs to prioritize victory with a stronger focus on economic issues.
“We are now at a place where we have to put winning way above being right all the time,” he told NBC News
in a story published Thursday, the day of his caucus election victory.
“It’s less of a left-right fight and more of a getting back to a Democratic Party that’s for everyday people, no longer being seen as preachy or disconnected,” Casar added.
The Texas Democrat argued the average Democratic voter is more culturally conservative than the party brands itself to be, leaving it “vulnerable” to GOP attacks.
President-elect Trump defeating Vice President Harris in every swing state
and increasing his vote share almost across the board has left Democrats debating what went wrong and what to do about it.
Casar said President Biden should have dropped out of the 2024 race earlier than he did, saying his late exit negatively impacted Harris’s campaign and Democrats more broadly.
But Casar also said Democrats must shift their focus back to the working class “without throwing vulnerable people under the bus,” such as immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community.
“We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up,” he told NBC. “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help.”
“We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”
