Campaign Finance Reform Should be the Focal Point of any Progressive Policy Agenda

Two point six billion dollars flowed into the 2024 election mainly focusing on the election of D. Tr_mp. I also believe there was a dislike for the candidate who replaced Joe Biden as the Democrat presidential candidate. A second time a well-qualified person (a woman) failed to be elected. I jabve heard all the arguments about why both of the lost. The reasoning for such not occurring is weak.

Citizens United and the Decline of US Democracy: Assessing the Decision’s Impact 15 Years Later – Roosevelt Institute, October, 2025

The 2024 federal elections saw the highest level of billionaire spending in American history. In an effort to influence outcomes, billionaire donors and their families spent over $2.6 billion. This amounts to a figure of nearly 20 percent of total federal election spending that cycle. Nearly three-quarters of billionaires’ spending on the 2024 presidential race supported the reelection of Donald Trump, the country’s first billionaire president (Tashman and Rice 2025). Tr_mp’s opening legislative act in his second term is a massive tax giveaway to the wealthy. It earned the dual distinctions of being the most regressive (Badger, Parlapiano, and Sanger-Katz 2025) and the most unpopular (Dale 2025) major law on record. 

While the 2024 election cycle set new records for billionaire spending, it did so in step with a broader trend. As Figure 1 shows, presidential elections have seen steadily rising spending from the ultra-wealthy for more than a decade. At the same time, the interests of the most affluent citizens and special interest groups have come to dominate policymaking, while the preferences of the average citizen have comparatively little discernable impact on policy outcomes (Gilens and Page 2014). 

How did billionaires come to wield such outsized influence in our political system?

This new era of unprecedented political spending by the ultra-wealthy can be traced back to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed unlimited money to pour into elections. Over 80 percent of the total amount spent by billionaires during the 2024 election cycle was spent through channels that were prohibited prior to Citizens United, while overall billionaire spending in elections has multiplied by a factor of 163 since the ruling (Tashman and Rice 2025). Meanwhile, over the same period of time, American democracy has been in decline. Public satisfaction with the way democracy is working in the US has reached record lows (Jones 2025), and experts now classify the US as a “flawed” rather than “full” democracy (The Economist 2024).

Despite the catastrophic impacts of Citizens United on American democracy, it is deeply entrenched in the political status quo. Presidential candidates from both major parties have gained a competitive edge from unlimited spending (Vogel and Goldmacher 2022). Every current member of Congress has been elected under a post Citizens United campaign system.

The Supreme Court has signaled that it will continue to expand on the Citizens United rationale (Hurley 2025). While these realities present barriers to reform in the short run, they also heighten the urgency of reviving the campaign finance reform debate. On the 15-year anniversary of the decision, campaign finance reform once again should be placed at the heart of any progressive policy agenda that takes seriously the need for democratic renewal.

The remaining question, is whether we will ever reach such a point in the campaign and election process.

“Most Of Billionaires’ $7.6 Trillion Has Never Been Taxed,” Americans For Tax Fairness