Florida Senator Marco Rubio has one; Texas Senator Ted Cruz has one; even former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum—considered a longshot for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016—has a billionaire in his corner. And Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has two.
As Reuters reports, campaign finance watchdog groups fear heavy spending by these ultra-rich Americans will warp the election—already expected to be the most money-soaked in history. The idea that billionaires can buy elections has taken root in the public imagination.
Those billionaires are now seeing small, early signs of a pushback. Whether this is the beginning of a new trend is far too soon to say, but polls show there is wider discontent about the perceived influence of big money in U.S. politics and a growing gulf between the country’s very rich and very poor.
These nascent rumblings, along with evidence that the super-rich are inefficient political spenders, raise questions about how effective billionaires will be in the 2016 elections.
“There’s growing public awareness about rich people trying to buy elections and that makes the task of winning all the more difficult,” says Darrell West, the author of Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust, and the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution think tank.
Potential big donors dispute the notion they are trying to buy elections and say they are simply using their positions to try to influence the future of the country in a positive way.
“I do believe—and I’ve told my kids this—that I can do more for them by giving money to the right presidential candidate in 2016 than by leaving them double that amount in my will,” says David Walsh, a retired investor living in Jackson, Wyoming. Walsh would not disclose his net worth, but he has given several multimillion-dollar gifts to charitable causes and says he plans to donate heavily to candidates in 2016.
The Democrats have billionaire supporters, too; most prominent among them is former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. Billionaires George Soros, Alice Walton and Marc Benioff already made small donations in 2014 to an outside spending group, Ready for Hillary PAC, backing Hillary Clinton, who is now the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary contest.
