The Midterm Billionaire War as America’s Oligarchs Pick Sides - Newsweek

Bernie Sanders had been railing against the billionaire class for years.

In December 2010, the Vermont senator held the Senate floor for more than eight and a half hours to protest a bipartisan deal extending tax cuts for the wealthy. When he ran for president in 2016, it became a line in nearly every speech.

Few in Washington paid attention to what he said. Polls showed that the billionaire class was not a big concern for voters, nor for Democrats. Gallup has long asked Americans to name the most important problem facing the country, and the gap between rich and poor drew roughly 2 percent of mentions, a number that hardly moved for over a decade. Democrats put it in a tie for ninth place as late as 2019.

There was also the optimism of the Facebook years. Silicon Valley icons like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and many others were revered in pop culture, regular guests on talk shows and on magazine covers. Time named Zuckerberg its Person of the Year in 2010. Musk got the title in 2021, the same year he hosted Saturday Night Live.

Gone are the years when tech tycoons were treated as heroes. America has soured on billionaires, and this election cycle, voters made sure politicians listened. Around 72 percent of Americans said there is too much money in politics, according to a Politico poll. Asked whether billionaires have too much influence, 61 percent said yes, including 75 percent of 2024 Kamala Harris voters and 55 percent of Donald Trump voters.

In The Harris Poll's 2025 Americans and Billionaires Survey, 53 percent of Americans said billionaires threaten democracy, up seven points from the previous year.

The amounts this cycle are unprecedented. Ad spending is projected to reach a record $11.6 billion, more than the $11.2 billion spent in the 2024 presidential race. Musk, the richest man in the world, has put $446 million of his own money into the midterms, most of it behind Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Senate campaign.

Democrats have their own big donors. George Soros has given about $102 million this cycle. Michael Bloomberg added roughly $80 million in September and October. Reid Hoffman's money has gone to super PACs backing anti-billionaire candidates in Texas and Kentucky.

In 2024, Kamala Harris's campaign spent about $1.5 billion over its 15-week run, close to $100 million a week in the busiest stretch.

The argument Sanders made now has plenty of company. Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, wrote this week that billionaire wealth "becomes a public problem when it finds its way into politics — making it harder for average voters to be heard. It throttles democracy."

As their involvement in politics became more public after the 2010 Citizens United decision, billions of dollars started pouring into political campaigns on both sides of the aisle.

Under federal rules, an individual can give a candidate only $3,500 per election. After 2010, a super PAC backing that same candidate can take unlimited sums.

This year, much of that money is going toward a defensive fight. Republicans hold both chambers in Congress and are trying to keep them with Trump's approval near historic lows. States the party once wrote off as safe have tightened, too. In late August, the Cook Political Report moved Iowa and Texas from lean Republican to toss-up, putting them alongside Alaska, Maine, Michigan and Ohio. Recent polling has shown Democrats ahead in Republican-held Senate races in Texas, Ohio and Kansas.

"It just seems like the sentiment continues to go towards the Democrats at this point. The Republicans seem to have gotten a little bit of their footing. But there aren't too many people who are optimistic about them holding the line anywhere. It's just a matter of how bad it's going to be for them," Mike Madrid, a veteran Republican strategist, told Newsweek.

The party's wealthiest backers have still answered with record sums. Of the $2.77 billion given by the 50 largest donors and organizations this cycle, Republican-aligned contributors account for $1.67 billion, twice the $832 million from Democratic-aligned ones, according to a Newsweek analysis of FEC records. Eight of the 10 biggest individual donors are on the Republican side. Soros and Bloomberg are the only exceptions.

Musk tops the list. His $446 million is more than half of what every Democratic-aligned donor in the top 50 has given put together, and more than four times the Soros total.

Democrats make up much of the difference through their own candidates. Looking only at money raised directly by campaigns, Democrats lead by about $285 million in House races and $425 million in Senate races. But once super PACs and other outside groups are included, the advantage flips, with Republicans holding a roughly $400 million lead, New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells found, citing tabulations by political analyst Nate Silver.

The split is easy to see in Texas. More than $367 million in ads have aired for Paxton, nearly three times what has been spent for Democrat James Talarico, according to figures released by AdImpact. Yet Talarico has raised about eight times as much as Paxton from donors giving to the campaigns themselves. In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson brought in four times as much from Maine voters in the third quarter, but Republican Senator Susan Collins and her allies have outspent Jackson's side by 40 percent, Wallace-Wells wrote.

Some of the biggest new players are less interested in which party wins than in what Congress does next. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, spent barely $2 million on politics in the 2022 midterms. By May of this year, the firm and its founders had passed $115 million, much of it routed through super PACs that back friendly candidates in both parties: Fairshake for crypto, Leading the Future for artificial intelligence. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, had added $50 million by the end of July.

Crypto money has its own stars. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who fought Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s founding and were later portrayed in David Fincher's 2010 blockbuster The Social Network, had given $42.7 million by the end of July, mostly to Republicans, according to the Times.

The fight over billionaire money has also reached the ballot itself. In California, voters will decide Tuesday on Proposition 40, a one-time 5 percent tax on the net worth of billionaires who lived in the state on January 1, 2026. Most of the money would go to health care for low-income residents after federal Medicaid cuts.

Emmanuel Saez, the UC Berkeley economist who co-wrote the measure, said it started as a request that billionaires "finally pay their fair share in taxes so that health care access could be preserved in California following Trump's Medicaid cuts."

"Billionaires have spent huge ($300m and counting) to defeat it so Prop 40 has become the symbol of the battle between democracy and oligarchy," he told Newsweek.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin leads the opposition with about $102 million. In December 2025, three weeks before the residency cutoff, he registered to vote in Nevada. Saez said the date was picked so billionaires would have a hard time leaving in time, since cutting tax residency also means cutting professional ties to the state. The New York Times has reported that Brin still commutes to Google in Silicon Valley every other week.

"That means he is almost certainly liable for the wealth tax and that's why he is spending so much to defeat Prop 40," Saez said.

Darien Shanske, a tax law professor at UC Davis who also helped draft the measure, doubted the move from the start. "The purported 'move' was never very plausible," he told Newsweek.

The money has moved the polls. In September, 52 percent of likely voters backed the measure in a Public Policy Institute of California survey. By October, it was losing, 46 percent to 52 percent. Opponents also funded two countermeasures, Propositions 41 and 42. If either gets more votes than Proposition 40, the tax fails even if a majority approves it.

Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the measure's lead sponsor, accused Brin and other billionaires of spending more than $1 million a day "to try to trick California voters." "The billionaires can buy all the ads they want," she said. "Billionaires can't buy the kind of credibility that our coalition members have with their members and communities, and they can't buy California voters."

Saez expects the fight to outlast Tuesday regardless of the result. "Even if Prop 40 fails, the issue of extreme wealth concentration and the extreme power to influence society and politics that comes with it remains," he said. He predicted wealth tax proposals would surface in other states and be "front and center" in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.

Sanders spent more than a decade railing against tax cuts for the rich, and for most of that time he was talking to himself. This year, Democrats from Texas to Maine are running on the same idea, though the party still depends on billionaires like Soros and Bloomberg to pay its bills.

California shows how difficult that balance can be. Governor Gavin Newsom says he supports a national billionaire tax but opposes Proposition 40. On October 9, he endorsed Proposition 42, the countermeasure largely funded by Brin. Both candidates for governor, Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra, have also opposed Proposition 40.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said the party is walking a narrow path. "Democrats need to be cautious about courting billionaires," he told Newsweek. "In a populist moment and with the Democratic Party split on engagement, Party leaders will have to walk a fine line between policing business practices and continuing political funding from those with deep pockets."

Others question whether the message wins votes at all.

"It's fine for Democrats to take on the billionaire class, but don't expect it to win a whole lot of new votes," said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way. Democrats should focus on what makes "a material difference in the lives of ordinary people," he said, including taxing the wealthy "quite a bit more" if that's what it takes. "But just taking on the billionaires without handling people's daily concerns is not enough."

Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, sees voters' resentment as tied to technology. "When you're looking at the billionaire class today, those are the people who run technology in this country," she told Newsweek. She also warned the party against getting lost in big structural fights if it wins power.

"If all they talk about is systemic change on, let's say, getting rid of monopolies or whatever that is, that's not gonna resonate with voters," she said. "Voters want an immediate kind of reaction and immediate policies that will alleviate their challenges when they look at their paycheck, and they look at their bills."

The resentment has a MAGA wing, too, and its loudest voice has spent years fighting the richest man in the world.

Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, started attacking what he calls the "oligarchs" before Trump's second inauguration. He splits them into Wall Street's "lords of easy money" and the tech titans of Silicon Valley, and he has called Musk "evil."

The frustration shows up among Republican voters as well. A CNBC survey this month found that many Republican voters who back AI development oppose the data centers being built to power it in their own communities.

There is also a contradiction. On the campaign trail, rivals have pounced on candidates who rally against the rich while taking their checks.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff calls the Trump White House "the most corrupt administration of all time." More than 70 billionaires have given almost half a million dollars to his campaigns, according to The Free Press. "The phoniest politician is a Democrat who whines about money in politics," Nathan Brand, a Republican strategist, told the outlet.

At a rally in El Paso, Talarico said that "Elon Musk is trying to buy this Senate seat." A super PAC supporting him has received money from Reid Hoffman and Adam Pritzker, and Bloomberg gave $2.5 million to another. Conservative critics have called him a hypocrite for it.

Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive hopeful in Michigan, made getting money out of politics a pillar of his campaign. Then Senate Majority PAC, which received $9 million from Soros' Democracy PAC, committed $30 million to the state. After El-Sayed attended a fundraiser hosted by Soros' nephew, Republican Mike Rogers' campaign said El-Sayed was for money out of politics only when it wasn't being spent on him. El-Sayed has said he welcomes support from individuals who want to give.

Hoffman also gave $500,000 in Kentucky to a super PAC backing Democrat Zach Dembo, who has campaigned against wealthy donors' influence. His Republican opponent, Ralph Alvarado, called it "dirty Epstein class money," a reference to Hoffman's past ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

The sharpest exchange came in Maine. At a debate, Jackson told Collins that no billionaires were funding him. Two days later, his campaign report listed donations from at least four. "You said that you would take no money from billionaires. That's not accurate," Collins told him at their next debate. The state Republican Party chairman, Jim Deyermond, called it "blatant hypocrisy."

Jackson's campaign says 95 percent of its contributions are under $100 and that it takes no corporate PAC money.

Those small checks are up against sums that would have been hard to picture 16 years ago. In 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, billionaires gave about $31 million to federal campaigns, less than 1 percent of all the money spent, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, a progressive advocacy group.

This cycle, the group has already tracked more than $1.7 billion from billionaire families and the companies they control. Its count stops in August, before Musk sent another $158 million to Senate Republicans' main super PAC in September.

The real number won't be known until well after Tuesday.

Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Gray R. Thomas