US politics has become a contest between billionaire-funded entities drawing voters to their brands

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. Bloomberg

American political parties are in disarray. Instead of being the engines that organise and drive the country's politics, their roles have been supplanted by partisan social media influencers, non-profit political groups, super political action committees (super Pacs) - and the billionaires who fund them and consultant groups they hire.

A few generations ago, it was the political parties who organised politics. In many communities there was an organic connection between the parties and their members. The parties provided structure and access and some benefits to those who belonged to and participated in their work.

That is no longer the case for most Americans. Today the parties have become “brands” to which voters are asked to identify. They are fundraising vehicles raising money for party operations and the consultant groups who now provide the “services” — message testing, voter data files, advertising and communications.

In other words, the connection between most voters and political parties are largely limited to a loose identification with the brand and to being on lists for fundraising emails, text messages, social media posts or robo-calls asking for money or votes. While these efforts do raise some funds, the amounts pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions contributed by billionaire donors who fill the coffers of the parties and the increasingly powerful liberal or conservative “unaffiliated” interest groups and political action committees.

It has been reported that in the 2024 presidential contest one of these liberal independent committees raised and spent almost as much as Kamala Harris's campaign (about $1 billion) on messaging that was sometimes at cross purposes with the Harris campaign they were supposedly backing. Republican independent expenditure groups did much the same, with one spending a quarter of a billion dollars targeting Arab and Jewish voters with disinformation mailings and ads designed to suppress their votes. In the end, the billions spent by the campaigns and the independent groups deluged voters with messages and counter-messages causing confusion and alienation.

Even when the parties provided funding to consultants to make personal contact with voters by hiring canvassers to go door to door or phone banks to call voter lists, the efforts were perfunctory and unconvincing because the canvassers or callers had no organic ties to the voters they were engaging. This is in marked contrast to decades ago when the canvassers and callers were local elected party captains engaging their neighbours with whom they had personal ties.

This lack of organic connection with voters, the weakness of the party infrastructures, and the barrage of television, social media and other forms of digital messaging are some of the reasons why party identification is at an all-time low, with 43 per cent of Americans now identifying as independent and Republicans and Democrats tied at 27 per cent each.

The parties have also lost their role in governing their electoral operations to the billionaires and interest groups. Look at the role they played in defeating congressional Democratic incumbents in the last election or how billionaire donors are stepping over the will of Democratic voters in New York City’s upcoming mayoral race. During the primary contest, these interests spent $30 million in advertising in at attempt to smear and defeat a progressive candidate, Zohran Mamdani.

Now, despite Mr Mamdani’s decisive win as the Democratic Party candidate, the same billionaires have pooled their money to support an independent in the November election. To date, Democratic officials have not criticised this move. The party has a rule stipulating that consultants who work against Democratic voter-endorsed incumbents or candidates will not be eligible for party-funded contracts. This sanction has not been applied to those groups that accepted contracts to defeat pro-Palestinian incumbent congressional Democrats, a clear demonstration of the “official” party’s weakness in the face of billionaire spending.

After losing 1,200 federal and state legislative seats during the Barack Obama era and suffering defeats in two of the last three presidential elections, I was initially optimistic to see two headlines in The New York Times last week, one of which read: “Democrats Are Mulling a 2026 Campaign Pivot: ‘We Need to Rethink Things’.” It appears that autopsies are being conducted to understand why Democrats are losing. After reading the piece, however, it became clear that some of the groups conducting the autopsies are the very independent expenditure-funded consultants that are the source of the problem. Their solution: better message testing, better use of social media and digital messaging, etc. In other words, pay us more and we’ll dig the hole deeper. No lessons learnt.

Parties need to reform and reconnect with and earn the trust of voters by rebuilding their state and local infrastructures

What needs to happen and is still not on the agenda is for the parties to reform and reconnect with and earn the trust of voters by rebuilding their state and local infrastructures. There is a push in that direction being made in the Democratic Party by some of its newly elected leaders. Spurred on by party reformers, they have greatly increased the funds being given to state parties, reducing the amounts sent to outside consultants. But as long as the billionaire-funded groups remain the dominant players in the political process, the Democratic reformers will continue to face an uphill battle to wrest back control over elections and party affairs. 

Meanwhile, the Republican side appears to be a lost cause. US President Donald Trump and his Maga movement have been able to take advantage of the weakness of their party’s organisation forcing it to submit and transforming it into a wholly owned Trump subsidiary. Republicans who opposed Mr Trump’s conquest have either been demeaned and silenced or drifted away to form PACs that have focused their resources on “anti-Trump” advertising campaigns which while celebrated by some Democrats have had no impact on rebuilding the Republican Party. 

The bottom line is that American politics has become less a battle between two competing organised political parties and more a contest between billionaire-funded entities waging virtual campaigns attempting to lure voters to endorse their “brands”. Until a significant effort is made to regulate the corrosive role of big money in politics, this will continue as will voter disaffection and alienation.