Seventy percent of Americans believe the economic system is rigged to favor the powerful. That's not a fringe view. Pew Research documented it across party lines, income levels, and geographic regions. Most people, when asked directly, will say the game is tilted against them.

They're right. And the mechanism that keeps it tilted has a name: the donor class.

The donor class is a specific subset of wealthy people: the relatively small number of corporations, executives, hedge fund managers, real estate developers, and billionaires who treat political donations as capital investments. They give large sums to candidates and parties as a business calculation, expecting a return. And in American politics, they consistently get one.

How Small the Group Actually Is

The numbers behind American political financing are stark. In the 2024 election cycle, total spending across all federal races exceeded $15 billion. A significant majority of that money came from a tiny fraction of the population.

OpenSecrets data consistently shows that the top donors, the fraction of Americans who give more than $200 to federal candidates, represent less than one percent of the population. The very top tier, those giving six or seven figures, is a smaller group still. Yet their money constitutes a majority of the funds flowing through American politics.

In 2024 alone, nearly $900 million in dark money, funds from anonymous donors routed through nonprofits that don't have to disclose contributors, went to support Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The Koch political network directed $548 million to Republican candidates and causes. Elon Musk contributed approximately $250 million to support Trump. These are individual actors moving sums that dwarf what thousands of small donors combined can produce.

What They Have in Common

The donor class spans both parties. Democratic donors include hedge fund managers, tech executives, Hollywood producers, and real estate developers. Republican donors include oil executives, private equity partners, defense contractors, and the same category of real estate developers. The lists overlap more than partisan rhetoric suggests.

What unites them, across party lines, is a shared interest in keeping certain policies in place. Low capital gains tax rates benefit both Democratic-aligned and Republican-aligned investors. Weak antitrust enforcement protects both left-leaning tech monopolies and right-leaning industrial consolidation. Opposition to strong union legislation runs through both donor bases because unions would shift bargaining power toward employees and away from owners. Drug pricing deregulation serves pharmaceutical donors regardless of which party they prefer.

This shared economic interest explains a consistent pattern: on the issues where donor class interests align, policy moves in one direction regardless of which party holds power. Drug pricing stayed broken under Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Tax rates on capital stayed favorable through decades of both parties governing. Housing regulations that might limit institutional investment never advanced in either party's legislative agenda. The party in power changes regularly. The policy outcomes on these issues largely hold.

How Dark Money Works

Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision, held that corporations and outside groups have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money on political communications. The practical effect was to dramatically expand the role of Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts but must disclose their donors, and 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations, which can engage in political activity without disclosing donors at all.

The 501(c)(4) loophole is where dark money lives. A billionaire can write a check to a nonprofit that doesn't have to disclose contributors. That nonprofit funds political advertising, voter outreach, or issue campaigns. The money influences elections while the source stays anonymous. Voters see the ads, read the mailers, and have no way to know who paid for them.

Dark money totaled in the billions in recent election cycles. It flows to both parties, which is why neither party has had much urgency about closing the loophole.

The Revolving Door

Political money doesn't only flow into campaigns. It flows through the careers of the people who make policy.

The revolving door describes the movement of individuals between government positions and the industries they regulate or legislate. A senator sits on the banking committee for twenty years, oversees the rules governing Wall Street, then retires and joins a financial firm at a salary that reflects what that committee access is worth. A pharmaceutical executive serves on an FDA advisory board, then returns to industry. A lobbyist becomes a deputy secretary, shapes the regulations they spent years lobbying against, then returns to lobbying at a higher rate.

The practice is legal. Former members of Congress can't directly lobby their former colleagues for one or two years depending on which chamber they served in. They can immediately advise lobbying firms on strategy, take jobs at the companies whose industries they regulated, and use their relationships in ways that technically comply with the waiting period.

This dynamic means the people making policy know that their future employment depends partly on how favorably they're perceived by the industries they oversee. That knowledge shapes decisions in ways that are hard to trace but easy to predict.

Why Knowing This Doesn't Change It

Seventy percent of Americans know the system favors the powerful. The knowledge doesn't automatically produce change because the donor class controls the mechanism that would have to produce change. Candidates need money to run for office. The money comes predominantly from the donor class. The candidates who get funded are, by selection, acceptable to donors. The candidates who aren't acceptable don't get funded and usually don't get elected.

The "money primary" happens before a single vote is cast. Donors have already filtered which candidates will have the resources to run serious campaigns. A politician who genuinely threatens major donor interests can win, but only without donor-class resources, against donor-funded opponents, in a media environment partly shaped by donor-class advertising spending. It happens, but it's hard.

The Labor Party's commitment to zero corporate donations addresses this mechanism directly. A party that refuses corporate money doesn't owe the donor class anything, which means its candidates can take positions that a donor-funded party can't. That's the practical argument for why the funding source matters, not as a symbol of purity but as a structural condition for being able to fight for what everyday Americans actually need.

The wage stagnation documented in Article 24, the tax code described in Article 26, the housing crisis of Article 27, and the healthcare system of Article 28 all share a common cause: the political system responds more reliably to the people funding it than to the people voting in it. The donor class is who those funders are.

Learn more at votelabor.org.