#28 Who's Spending $517 Million on Congress This Year
American companies have put a record five hundred seventeen million dollars into this year's House and Senate races, and the biggest spenders are not the oil companies or the drug companies. Today I am going to show you which industries are writing those checks, the scorecard one of them built to rank your congressman, and the one specific law all of that money is being spent to buy.
Let me give you the number first, because the number is the whole story.
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American companies have put five hundred seventeen million dollars into House and Senate races in the fifteen months ending this spring. The old record was four hundred sixty one million dollars, and that was for the entire twenty twenty four election cycle, president included. So we have already blown past the record with more than two months still to go before people vote.
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That count comes from Federal Election Commission filings. Those are public documents. Anybody can go pull them. The tally was put together by a group called Public Citizen, which leans left, and I will say that up front so you know where it came from. The filings underneath it are not left or right. They are just the paperwork the law makes these companies file.
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Now here is where it gets interesting. Of that five hundred seventeen million, at least two hundred ninety four million came from four sectors. Cryptocurrency. Artificial intelligence. Big tech. And online sports betting.
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Twenty years ago three of those four did not exist in any form that mattered. Now they are the biggest political spenders in the country.
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The playbook here is not new. It got written in twenty twenty four by the crypto industry. Coinbase, Ripple and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz put their money into a super PAC called Fairshake. Fairshake went after Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Brown was a Democrat, he was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and he had been in the Senate for eighteen years. He was not friendly to crypto. He lost his seat.
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Fairshake also spent money helping Democrats that same cycle. Ruben Gallego in Arizona. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. Both Democrats, both got crypto money, both won.
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So look at what that industry actually did. It knocked off a powerful Democrat in one state and it propped up two Democrats in two others. That is not a party operation. That is an industry checking one box on a form. Are you good for us or are you a problem for us. Everything else about the candidate is somebody else's business.
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It worked, so everybody copied it.
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Fairshake started this year with one hundred ninety three million dollars in the bank. As of the middle of the summer it still had around one hundred thirty million left to spend. That is not a campaign fund. That is a standing army.
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The artificial intelligence people looked at that and decided they wanted one too. A super PAC called Leading the Future has raised about one hundred forty million dollars since the beginning of last year. Most of that came from a handful of men. The president and co founder of OpenAI and his wife each put in twelve and a half million. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each put in twelve and a half million of their own money on top of what their firm gave.
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Then in the spring another one showed up. Fox News reported it in March. A group called Innovation Council Action announced it intends to spend more than one hundred million dollars in these midterms. It is championed by a tech investor named David Sacks, who also serves as the White House artificial intelligence advisor. And this is the part I want you to hang onto, because it is in the reporting and almost nobody has said it out loud.
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That group built a scorecard. It ranks members of Congress on how well they line up with the administration's artificial intelligence agenda. And that scorecard is what decides where the money goes.
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A scorecard. On members of Congress. Funded by the industry being scored on.
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The gambling money works the same way. DraftKings, FanDuel, Fanatics and the British book bet three sixty five have put in more than seventy two million dollars between them. That makes online betting the third biggest corporate donor bloc in the country this cycle. The prediction market Polymarket sent a million dollars through its parent company to a Republican super PAC tied to the Speaker of the House.
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There is more of this money than the headline number shows. A lot of it moves through what they call affiliate PACs, where a super PAC funds another PAC that funds another one, and by the time it lands on a television ad in your market you would need a forensic accountant to trace it back. Some of it moves through nonprofits that never have to name a single donor. The people who count this stuff say plainly that the true total is higher than what gets reported, because the reporting only catches what the law makes them disclose.
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You can see the shape of it in the names. The crypto side has Fairshake. It also has a fund backed by the Winklevoss twins that has raised over twenty two million dollars, and a nonprofit arm that does not disclose its numbers at all. The venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has put more than eighty one million dollars into crypto and artificial intelligence political committees.
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And there is a reason for the urgency. Congress is writing the first real national rules for both of these industries right now. The crypto bill they want most cleared the Senate Banking Committee this spring. The artificial intelligence framework is being drafted. Whatever passes will sit on the books for a decade or more. If you are that industry, buying a Congress this year is cheaper than living with the law that Congress writes.
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And then you have the individuals. Elon Musk has put more than ninety million dollars into federal races this cycle and says he is not done. Sergey Brin, the co founder of Google, spent more than one hundred six million dollars in California alone, a lot of it fighting a proposed wealth tax. Meta gave sixty five million dollars to four different super PACs, and those PACs are backing candidates from both parties in state races.
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Both parties. On purpose. Because the party is not the point.
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So why the midterms? Midterms are the quiet election. Turnout is low. Half the country cannot name their own congressman. If you are going to spend a fortune, why not spend it in a presidential year when everybody is watching?
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Because quiet is the whole idea.
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In a presidential year you are fighting for attention against the biggest show in the country and everything costs triple. In a midterm primary, in a state where four hundred thousand people might show up to vote, a few million dollars decides it. Crypto money put roughly twelve million dollars into one Senate runoff in Alabama this year. Twelve million in one runoff. You cannot move a presidential race for that. You can absolutely move a runoff.
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Here is the detail about these advertisements that I could not get out of my head once I read it. The groups spending this money on artificial intelligence policy are running ads that do not mention artificial intelligence. At all. They run ads about the cost of living, about crime, about the candidate’s family, about anything. The reporters who went through the ad libraries found the same thing over and over. Hundreds of ads catalogued, and the issue the money exists to decide is not in them.
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They are not trying to persuade anybody about the policy. They are not making an argument to the public at all. They are just buying the seat and settling the policy afterward, where you cannot see it.
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And the industry is not one side. There is a rival group on the other end of the same fight, called Public First Action. It has raised around eighty million dollars, with about forty million of that from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, and it argues the opposite way, that states should keep the right to regulate. It is run by two former congressmen, one Republican and one Democrat. It has run advertising thanking Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee for her work on technology policy, and backing Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, who has been outspoken on safety.
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So do not let anybody sell you the simple version where it is technology on one side and normal people on the other. Two factions of the same industry are spending nine figures against each other, and both of them are buying congressional seats to settle an argument they are having with each other.
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The trackers who follow this put the artificial intelligence money alone at more than a hundred seven million dollars raised and around fifty five million already spent in federal races, with another twenty million or more going into state races, most of that from Meta and Google. In Texas alone, groups funded by artificial intelligence leaders put around two point eight million dollars into congressional races, mostly behind Republican House candidates who favor a light regulatory touch.
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And there is a third bloc that runs the same play on a different issue. The pro Israel lobbying operation runs its money through a web of committees, including what people in this business call pop up super PACs, which are groups that form, spend heavily, and delay disclosing who funded them until after the votes are counted. In one state primary this spring, three of those groups spent over sixteen million dollars without voters knowing where the money came from. Put crypto, artificial intelligence and that operation together and you have the three biggest independent spenders in the country this cycle, well over a hundred eighty million dollars between them.
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And it works. By the end of June the two biggest artificial intelligence super PACs had put at least forty four million dollars into forty House and Senate candidates. That count comes from CNBC going through the Federal Election Commission filings themselves. Of the twenty eight candidates that Leading the Future backed, twenty five of them won their primaries. One lost. Two had not voted yet.
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Twenty five out of twenty six. Nobody in politics hits that. Not the party committees, not the president, nobody. When an industry PAC is running a batting average like that, every member of Congress notices, and that is the entire point. You do not have to beat a hundred people. You have to beat two or three loudly enough that the other ninety seven do the math on their own.
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And it is not just congressional races. Counting everything, all the billionaires and the unions and the causes, a record eleven point six billion dollars is expected to be spent on political advertising in these midterms. The old record was eleven point two billion, and that was a presidential year.
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There is one more piece and it matters. The Supreme Court this year struck down the limits on coordinated spending between candidates and the party committees. So the ceiling came off at the exact moment these industries showed up with the cash.
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Here is the number that ties it together. Since the Citizens United decision in twenty ten, corporations have spent about one and a half billion dollars in federal elections. One third of that entire sixteen year total has been spent in this one cycle. And it is not over.
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So when somebody tells you the midterms do not matter, understand that the people with the most money in this country disagree with you, and they are voting with their checkbooks.
So what is the rule they are buying? Because they are not spending half a billion dollars for the fun of it. There is something specific on the table.
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The word is preemption. It means Washington passes one national rule and every state law on the subject stops working.
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Over the last three years the states got out ahead of Washington on artificial intelligence, the way states usually do when Congress cannot get out of its own way. More than a thousand bills got filed in state legislatures in a single year. Dozens of states passed something.
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Preemption does not fix those laws. It erases them.
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This already came up once, and it got maybe two days of coverage.
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Last year a ten year moratorium on state artificial intelligence laws got written into the big reconciliation bill. Ten years. Every state, frozen, no new rules and no enforcing the ones already on the books. It passed the House. It came over to the Senate attached to the president's own agenda, and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Cruz, was carrying it.
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To get it through, they tied it to money. States that kept enforcing their artificial intelligence laws would risk losing federal broadband funding. Forty two billion dollars of broadband funding for rural America. That is the leverage they used. Drop your law or lose the money that was supposed to run internet to your county.
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And it fell apart. On the first of July, at four thirty in the morning, in the middle of a twenty seven hour voting session, the Senate voted ninety nine to one to strip that language out of the bill.
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Ninety nine to one. There is nothing in Washington that gets ninety nine votes. They cannot get ninety nine votes to name a post office.
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The senator who filed the amendment that killed it was Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
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And she is the one who makes this story what it is. Blackburn had spent that week negotiating a compromise with Cruz. They had a deal. Ten years cut down to five, with some protections carved out for kids and for artists. The president had been told about it and liked it. And then she read the fine print on the carve outs and pulled the plug on her own deal.
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Her reason, in her own words, was that the language could let big tech keep exploiting kids, creators and conservatives. Kids, creators and conservatives. That is not a talking point from the left. That is a Republican senator saying the quiet part in plain English.
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There is a Tennessee angle here too. Our state passed a law protecting a performer's voice from being cloned by a machine without permission. Nashville pushed for it. Under that moratorium, that law could have gone dark. So when Blackburn says creators, she is talking about people who live and work about two hours down the road from where I am sitting.
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Now look at who lined up against that moratorium before the vote. Seventeen Republican governors. Forty state attorneys general. And on the outside, the Heritage Foundation opposed it and the Center for American Progress opposed it.
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Heritage is the flagship conservative think tank in this country. The Center for American Progress is about as far the other direction as you can get and still be respectable in Washington. Those two organizations agree on almost nothing. They agreed on this.
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When Heritage and the left wing shops end up on the same side of a vote, that tells you the fight is not left against right. Somebody wanted something so badly that they lost everybody at once.
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One senator voted to keep it. One. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and there are people who will tell you that vote may have been a mistake.
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There is one more detail from that week that tells you everything about how close it was. The compromise Blackburn walked away from said states could keep their laws on kids and on a person's name, image and likeness, but only if those laws did not put an undue or disproportionate burden on artificial intelligence systems. Lawyers looked at that sentence and said out loud that half the state laws already on the books would fail that test, and the rest would end up in court for years. That is not a carve out. That is a trap door with a nice sign on it.
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When it fell apart, Cruz was visibly angry on the floor and blamed outside interests for killing the deal. And he was not entirely wrong that outside groups piled on. He just left out that seventeen governors of his own party were among them.
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So that is a loss. A total, humiliating loss.
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Here is what happened next.
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In December the president signed an executive order pushing for one national framework on artificial intelligence. That order directs federal agencies to lean on states that pass their own rules, including going after those laws in court and putting federal funding at risk. In March the White House put out a full policy framework with more than two dozen legislative recommendations built on that order. Senator Blackburn has her own draft bill trying to do a narrower version of the same thing.
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And the industry that lost that vote did not go home. It went to the ballot box.
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That is what all this money is. That is what the scorecard is for. The whole point of the super PACs is to make sure that when preemption comes back around, and it is coming back around, there are enough members in that chamber who need the money more than they need their own state's law.
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And I skipped a step. That moratorium did not appear out of nowhere in the Senate. The House of Representatives passed the ten year version first, in May of last year, and sent it over. So it is not like one committee chairman slipped it in at midnight. A majority of the House voted for it with their names on the board.
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Then look at what happened after the Senate killed it. The thing that could not survive that vote came back as an executive order five months later.
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And the constitutional point matters here. An executive order cannot preempt a state. Congress can preempt states through legislation under its Article One powers. A president cannot do it with a signature. Which is exactly why the industry needs a Congress that will pass it, and exactly why that money is in these primaries.
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And here is the one that should tell you the whole story. In New York, a state assemblyman named Alex Bores wrote one of the first state artificial intelligence safety laws in the country. He then ran for Congress. The industry super PAC came in against him. He lost his primary.
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That is the message, and it was not aimed at him. It was aimed at every state legislator in America who was thinking about writing a bill like his. Write one and we will end your career before it starts.
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And they told us it was coming back. The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said after that vote that they were still going to work it, and that he hoped they would get state preemption in the end. That is not me reading tea leaves. That is the man in charge of the committee saying so on the record.
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The people pushing preemption have an argument and it is not a stupid one. Fifty states with fifty different sets of rules is a real mess for anybody trying to build something. A company in Texas should not need a lawyer in every state capital. There is a version of a national standard that would actually be good.
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But there is a difference between a national standard and a blank check. A national standard means Washington writes the rules. A moratorium with no federal rules underneath it does not mean one rulebook. It means no rulebook. It means for ten years nobody is in charge of anything and every state that tried to protect its own people gets told to sit down.
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And understand what the states were actually doing with these laws, because the word regulation makes people picture something bigger than this. Robocalls. Deepfake videos of real people saying things they never said. Rules so a machine cannot clone a person's voice and sell it. Rules for self driving cars on state roads. Parental controls on chatbots talking to children. Zoning on where a data center can go and what it has to pay for.
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Every one of those is the kind of thing a state legislature has handled since before any of us were born. None of it is exotic. And all of it would have gone dark for ten years.
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That is not federalism and it is not conservative. Conservatives have spent fifty years arguing that Washington should not steamroll the states. Well, here is the test. This is the exact fact pattern. And a lot of people who gave that speech for fifty years have gone quiet since the checks started clearing.
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A rule the Senate rejected ninety nine to one is now being bought one primary at a time.
So who is actually fighting this? Because if you have been listening to the coverage you would think it is a handful of progressives yelling about billionaires.
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It is not. Go look at the names.
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Start with Josh Hawley of Missouri. Hawley has turned into the loudest voice in his own party against the way this is going, and he has taken real incoming for it. He gave a speech at a conservative conference in Washington laying out the case that the artificial intelligence build out serves the people who are already the most powerful men on earth and hands the bill to everybody else. He has put his name on legislation to require companies to report layoffs caused by artificial intelligence, to keep this technology out of the hands of kids, to stop training these systems on other people's copyrighted work, and to cut off cooperation with China. He voted against the moratorium and he said so out loud while his own leadership was pushing it.
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And here is the story he tells, which is the one that made this real for me.
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Earlier this year in Festus, Missouri, a town of about fourteen thousand people, the city council held a meeting about approving a six billion dollar data center. Hundreds of residents packed into the high school gym. Six billion dollars in a town of fourteen thousand.
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They lined up at the microphone one at a time and asked the questions any of us would ask. What happens to my electric bill. What happens to the water. Who is paying for the power lines. Who pays for it if this goes wrong.
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The council could not really answer them.
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Now, I did an episode on your electric bill not long ago, so I am not going to run the whole thing again. But you already know where the rates are headed and you already know who is standing in line for the power. What I want you to notice is where that fight is happening. It is happening in a high school gymnasium in a town of fourteen thousand people in Missouri. That is a local decision, made by a local council, under a state's rules.
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Preemption is about who gets to answer the people in that gym.
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Hawley's answer to that gym full of people is worth hearing because it is not a slogan. He says the companies building these places can afford to supply their own power, protect residential electric rates, and safeguard the local water, and that we should hold them to it with binding legal requirements instead of promises. That is it. Build what you want, pay your own way, and put it in writing.
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That is about as conservative a position as exists. You are not banning anything. You are telling a company it does not get to hand its costs to the guy down the road who never agreed to any of it.
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Then look at Florida. Ron DeSantis spent his last year in office fighting the White House on this. He called for a state level artificial intelligence bill of rights, aimed at parental controls, at your name and likeness being taken, and at these hyperscale data centers draining local water and driving up local power bills. When the president's executive order came out, DeSantis said plainly that an executive order does not get to preempt a state. His words on the preemption push were that it is bad policy and even worse politics.
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Then his attorney general, James Uthmeier, sued OpenAI and its chief executive directly. First state in the country to do it. That case is about harms to children, and I am not going to walk through the details of it on this show because some of it involves families who lost kids and they deserve better than being turned into a segment. But it is a Republican attorney general in a red state taking the biggest artificial intelligence company in the world into court.
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Florida went further than talk. Lawmakers there went straight at the hyperscale data centers, at the water they pull and the electric rates they push up on everybody else. And Florida is not alone in court. The attorney general of Kentucky sued a chatbot company earlier this year on the same basic argument, that the company put its own profits ahead of the safety of kids. Kentucky and Florida. Two red states, two Republican attorneys general, going after this industry directly while Washington argues about whether states are even allowed to.
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And it is not just the ones on their way out. Byron Donalds, the Republican front runner to be the next governor of Florida, has said flat out that he disagrees with the president on preemption. In Texas, Ken Paxton has campaigned on taking on big tech. Marsha Blackburn is running for governor of Tennessee while all of this is happening.
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Byron Donalds is worth a second look, because he shows you where this is going. He is running for governor of Florida, he has broken with the president on preemption, and he has introduced federal legislation to regulate data centers. And here is the wrinkle. The pro regulation artificial intelligence group has run ads for him, citing that position. So one faction of the industry is now funding a Republican gubernatorial front runner because he wants rules.
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That is how tangled this is. It is not even industry against government. It is money on every side of an argument that most voters have never been asked about.
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So run the list back. Hawley. Blackburn. DeSantis. Uthmeier. Donalds. Paxton. Seventeen Republican governors. Forty state attorneys general. The Heritage Foundation.
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That is not a progressive uprising. That is the Republican Party arguing with itself while an industry with more money than God sits in the middle deciding which half of it to fund.
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Hawley has also been blunt about the jobs piece, and this is where he takes the most heat from his own side. He points at what the technology executives say themselves in public. One of them predicted half of entry level white collar jobs could be gone within five years. Half. Hawley's line on it is that the country is sorting into two groups, the people who own this technology and get very rich, and everybody else who gets quietly replaced.
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Now you can argue with that forecast. Plenty of smart conservatives do, and they point out that people said the same thing about the tractor, the computer and the internet, and we came out the other side with more work, not less. That is a real argument and I am not going to pretend it is not. But notice that we are not having that argument in Congress. We are having it in super PAC advertisements that never once mention artificial intelligence.
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And that is the thing I keep coming back to.
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The money in this fight is not trying to make Congress Republican or make it Democrat. It does not care. It is trying to make Congress agree on one specific answer, and it will pay either party to get there. Meta wrote checks to four super PACs backing both sides. Crypto took out a Democratic committee chairman in Ohio and paid to elect Democrats in Arizona and Michigan the same year. The betting industry runs its money through one PAC with a conservative name and one with a neutral name and sends both to whichever statehouse is threatening to regulate it.
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You can vote out every incumbent in Washington in November. Every single one. And if the new ones need that money to keep their jobs, the answer on preemption does not change.
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That is what people mean when they say their vote does not matter, and I do not like saying it because I think voting matters more than almost anything. But you have to be honest about what you are up against. You are not up against a party. You are up against a purchase order.
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So what do you actually do with this.
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You watch the state fights, because that is where this is being decided and that is where your voice is still worth something. A state legislator gets a few thousand votes. He knows what his district thinks. He answers the phone.
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You ask your congressman one question and you make him answer it. Do you support preempting my state's artificial intelligence laws, yes or no. Not a paragraph. Yes or no. Then go look at who funded him and see if the answer matches the money.
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And when the next data center comes to your county, go to the meeting. Ask about the power. Ask about the water. Ask who pays. Those people in Festus did, and it is the reason a United States senator is telling their story.
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The people spending this money are counting on you not paying attention in a midterm year. That is the entire plan. It is not complicated and it is not a conspiracy. It is written down in public filings with their names on them.
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Ninety nine senators out of one hundred said no to this. It is still coming anyway.
AND THAT'S IT.
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
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I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
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Because everyone knows. *** Your silence is your consent