The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations Is Overwhelming U.S. Politics
Several years ago, before he was elected as a U.S. senator from Montana, Tim Sheehy was running an aerial firefighting business that was struggling to secure clients and desperately hunting for cash to build out a fleet of aircraft.
Then he found a lifeline: As Mr. Sheehy has told the story over the years, Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the private equity group Blackstone Inc., helped steer a $150 million investment from his company into Mr. Sheehy’s.
Both Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Sheehy came out winners. Blackstone nearly doubled its investment by cashing in many of its shares a few years later, even as the firefighting company continued to struggle. Mr. Sheehy collected multi-million-dollar bonuses that helped him seed his Republican Senate campaign in 2024.
It was an uphill race against a popular, three-term Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester. But with control of the Senate up for grabs and Mr. Sheehy one of the few who could help tip it in favor of Republicans, Mr. Schwarzman came to his aid once again, hosting a fund-raiser for him and also donating $8 million to a political action committee that supported his candidacy.
He was not the only financial heavyweight in Mr. Sheehy’s corner.
At least 64 billionaires and 37 of their immediate family members donated directly to his campaign, a New York Times analysis found. When also accounting for money that flowed through political committees that support Mr. Sheehy, an analysis shows that billionaires contributed about $47 million in the race that Mr. Sheehy went on to win.
The extraordinary spending in Montana is part of a new era of political power for the rapidly growing number of billionairesminted over the past eight years. The Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.
Five presidential elections ago, before the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions, the share of billionaire spending was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise.
The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, an amount roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined. And that does not count money that billionaires contributed through dark money groups that do not have to disclose their donors.