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The 2024 Election Was Smothered in Dark Money—How Do We Turn on the Lights?
A new Brennan Center study found that dark money groups spent almost $2 billion on the 2024 election, roughly double the total spent in 2020.
May 08, 2025
Every day brings a new story about the outsized role of private wealth in American politics. Elon Musk slashing and burning his way through federal agencies. Billionaire campaign donors like Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon running cabinet departments. Other Trump patrons reportedly shaping policy on everything from crypto to the Middle East. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, a small group of major donors is organizing to fund the party’s 2026 push to retake Congress.
And these are only the donors we know about.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision ushered in the era of “dark money”—ballooning campaign spending by groups that do not disclose their funding sources. On Wednesday, the Brennan Center published a study by the journalist Anna Massoglia. She found that dark money groups spent almost $2 billion on the 2024 election, roughly double the total spent in 2020. And that’s the money Massoglia could identify—the real total is almost certainly higher, perhaps substantially so.
Voters are deeply unhappy about the role of money in politics, but years of inaction to address this issue have also left them understandably cynical.
The term “dark money” as we use it refers to election spending by groups that are not legally required to—and do not—disclose their donors. Most of this spending would have been illegal before Citizens United, which eviscerated many long-standing limits on campaign money and led to the creation of super PACs, political organizations that can raise and spend unlimited money on campaigns.
The justices got many things wrong in Citizens United. One of them was their assurance that all the new campaign spending they had just allowed would be transparent, allowing Americans to be fully informed about who was trying to influence their votes.
The justices seem not to have realized, however, that many of the new groups they were now permitting to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns were not subject to any disclosure rules. There have since been numerous efforts to fix this oversight and require all major campaign donors to be made public—most recently as part of the Freedom to Vote Act, which came within two votes of overcoming a Senate filibuster in 2022—but none of those bills have made it through Congress.
Meanwhile, dark money in federal elections has continued to rise—and become even harder to trace. In the years immediately after Citizens United, groups that didn’t reveal their donors tended to purchase their own campaign ads, which were at least reported to the Federal Election Commission if they ran in the weeks before the election and were therefore fairly easy to track. Even if the source of the money was opaque, we could see the spending itself.
Now, as our new analysis shows, reported campaign ads account for just a tiny fraction of dark money spending. Most of it now goes directly into the coffers of super PACs, and some of it pays for online ads and early-cycle TV and radio ads not subject to any legally required disclosure. We are able to track down some of that money due to voluntary disclosures and research using services that monitor TV advertising, but our overall tally of dark money spent in 2024 is an undercount, possibly by a large margin.
Both Republicans and Democrats benefited from significant dark money support in 2024, but the majority of traceable dark money backed Democrats. Most of those funds went toward enormous spending in the presidential race—$1 out of every $6 in dark money that we can track was funneled to Future Forward, the super PAC backing Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris. Trump’s dark money support that we know about was not as high, although it still amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars (including more than $35 million that paid for apparent “false flag” ads in swing states designed to look like they came from Harris).
Ultimately, neither party will have any incentive to curb reliance on secret spending absent a change in the law. To congressional Democrats’ credit, they included a fix in the Freedom to Vote Act. It was among the most popular provisions in the bill, enjoying broad public support among voters from both parties.
Voters are deeply unhappy about the role of money in politics, but years of inaction to address this issue have also left them understandably cynical. Regaining Americans’ trust must include concrete steps to make it easier for them to hold political leaders accountable. Providing the transparency that even Citizens United promised 15 years ago would be a good place to start.
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How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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Why the Black Community Can't Let 2024's Betrayal Keep It From the Anti-Trump Fight
If we don't join together in this current crisis and the battles to come but sit on the sidelines licking our wounds, continuing to feel offended and betrayed, then the forces of oppression win.
Apr 26, 2025
Significant numbers in the Black community feel betrayed by our so-called allies who ignored the warnings of Black people regarding the election, its political rhetoric, and the history of racism and white supremacy in the country. So, in response to feelings of betrayal a Black preacher in Chicago recently framed the sentiment on social media, writing, "Nope, I turned out in November; they didn't!"
This feeling is pervasive within the Black community as people articulate the frustrations felt because of the outcome of the presidential elections last November. When asking people to turn out for the "Hands Off" rallies, the Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or even to protest the roundup of immigrants, there is a post-November 2024 pushback which is derived from a sense of betrayal because the people now asking for our participation and support did not stand with the Black community in the 2024 elections. In barbershops, beauty shops, nail salons, social clubs, fraternities, and sororities discussions have been animated expressing various theories in America's rejection of a Black person for President, and particularly in this case, a Black woman. The underlying feelings is that of betrayal and desertion.
Sure, there are all kinds of justifications for the rejection of the Harris-Walz ticket ranging from the Biden-Harris support of the genocide in Gaza, "She was a prosecutor who contributed to mass incarceration", to "I will not vote for the lesser of two evils." There were also the economic arguments citing inflation, and the failure of the Biden administration to deal with the cost of going to the grocery store. There were also the clandestine discussions laced with misogyny and race offering that a woman was unable to lead, and a Black woman was even worse than a Black man. Race and gender hatred are strong undercurrents of the Harris rejection, which is confirmed by the Trump-MAGA obsession with attacking and dismantling all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
We have been played, and it is important for us to remember that the political game of fascism will have its way with us if we decide to sit out the various movements that attempt to resist this currently hostile order.
The dog whistle to white America is that DEI led to the election of a Black president in 2008, the increasing visibility of other Black faces, the prominence of people of color and different kinds of people in government and leadership, as well as advancing the sensibilities of gender equality. The anti-DEI framework also believes that immigrants have been welcomed and coddled by offering sanctuary and protection, multiplying their numbers, which dilutes the white population and poses a serious threat to the powers of white supremacy and the white ability to rule. Indeed, we are seeing and witnessing currently an aggressive clutch for power and the reassertion of white supremacy.
The Black community had seen all this before and can still hear the ghostly chains of enslavement synchronized to the racist tropes of old. The Black community largely was not fooled by the appeals of grocery store affordability or removing immigrants to make way for "Black" jobs, or the other empty promises of MAGA-Trump. We had seen it all, and it is difficult for us to believe that others could not see what we saw. Likewise, it is difficult and unbelievable to hear people now state that "it is worse than I imagined." We knew what would happen, and we feel betrayed by so-called allies who did not listen to our counsel and should have understood the racist history of America better and heeded the violence planned against people because of race, immigration, gender, or belonging to the LGBTQIA community. Instead of heeding all our warnings and alarms, significant enough numbers of white women, Latinos, and even some Black folks chose to drink the Kool-Aid of a sanitized racism sweetened with appeals of bringing jobs home, cheaper eggs, and making America first in the world.
There are all kinds of justifications for the Trump victory in 2024. Economic grievances, the lesser of two evils argument, objections resulting from the Gaza genocide, concern over former Vice President Kamala Harris' legal career and governmental service, and the secret handshakes and winks expressing real disdain for a Black woman led to Harris' defeat. But the latter three arguments or justifications were not persuasive to the Black community because the choices offered in this political system have always been between the lesser of two evils, and race history in America has taught us of the precariousness of life and that we always live under threat of a massacre or genocide.
We have never experienced a benevolent government. Though some governments and candidates have been better than others, the very structure of governance has never been benevolent. The system is not a system that is just or fair, but it has always been a system where fights have had to be waged for justice and fairness. We have always had to weigh who would be better on race, and who would be worse. We have had to weigh who would be better to fight against versus who would be worse. We have had to analyze and understand what sources of money and forces of political power were behind a candidate and what that ultimately meant for the safety of the Black community and our advancement. The lesser of the worst argument has always been the Black reality, and we have understood historically that the system is malicious in character, racially unjust, and unfair. There has been a constant fight to go forward, and a continuous struggle against being pushed back.
We said to the immigrant community that the assault on race was real, that the immigrant community would be hunted and hounded like Black folks were before and after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act or stopped and arrested like scores of people "driving while Black," but we were not heard or understood. Portions of the Latino community were pulled to the right and voted against their own interest despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump-MAGA campaign. A segment of the Latino community did not realize at the time that the rhetoric would criminalize and endanger all the Latino community. A resident of Prince Georges County, Maryland, Kílmar Abrego García, was disappeared to El Salvador. According to the administration his arrest and deportation were a mistake, but it is a mistake that the administration obstinately refuses to correct. There are also numbers of Latinos being stopped and arrested by masked goons and swept away. It is reported that the administration is scouring through social media and legal documents gleaning any kind of justification for the cancelling of student visas and the deportation of immigrants (documented and undocumented). Yet, 43% of the Latino community voted for U.S. President Donald Trump! This represented an increase of 8% more Latino votes going to Trump than in the previous presidential elections. When we hear this statistic, we are rightfully alarmed, yet we cannot lose sight that this also means that 57% of the Latino community understood the struggle in America and took seriously the alarm cited by the Black community.
We were further alarmed by women who seem unable to hear the warnings of misogyny that have been experienced throughout the Black sojourn in America. The struggle to have autonomy over being, health, and existence have been all too real in the Black experience. Therefore, the Black community felt that women would surely hear, understand, and mobilize around the assaults on reproductive freedom, healthcare, and body autonomy. So, it was a surprise to know that 53% of white women voted for Trump. Similar majorities of white women have backed Republican presidential nominees in every election since 2004. But we have also forgotten, because of the ways statistics are sensationalized, that a majority of "ALL" women voted for the Harris-Walz ticket. They rejected the narrow and racist perspectives of the right-wing agenda in this election and in previous elections as well.
We can emotionally understand the Arab-Muslim-Pro-Palestine base not voting for Harris. By any stretch of the imagination, it would have been a steep climb to expect them to simply vote for the supporters of the Netanyahu-Zionist genocide in Gaza. So, this bloc of voters in protest either voted for Trump, a third-party candidate, or sat out the elections as punishment for the Biden-Harris blind support of Israel and its occupation and genocide. But not voting for the lesser of two evils in this case was to cast a vote for the victor—Trump. The protest vote, whether for Trump, a third-party candidate, or to sit out the election had the effect of turning loose and unmuzzling the monster of America's original sin—racism and white supremacy. The deserved punishment of Harris meant rewarding the deeply entrenched agenda of whiteness and unleashing a ferocious and unapologetic form of hatred that will require extreme and Herculean measures to resist.
Yet even the Black community is not immune from its own contradictions rooted in sexism and racial self-hatred. We are infected with all the gender bias that exists in the larger community, as well as our own struggles against one another—self-hatred. For example, though Harris won 80% of the Black vote, that however represented a 10% drop from former President Joe Biden in 2020. This means that 90% of the Black community would vote for a white man versus only 80% for a Black woman. Biden received 81 million votes in 2020 and Harris only 75 million in 2024. Six million voters either stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate. It was not necessarily that Biden was a better candidate over Harris, but he was white and male!
The Trump-MAGA forces exploited the gender and race biases within the Black, Latino, and white (male and female) communities. The political right offered and framed news stories and opinions promoting the gender crisis for Harris among Black males in an effort to give permission to Black males to desert a Black woman. There is also the psychological damage of being Black in a white world where the culture has conditioned people to think that white is better than Black, and white male is far better than Black female!
The impurity and contradictions of the American political system have always placed before us choices of evil. The Black perspective however had always had to discern which evil is more entrenched and enshrined in the callous and sub-human hatred of old. One evil represents a historical cloth that produced the Trail of Tears, protected slavery, removed Indigenous people from lands at home and abroad, and celebrated white supremacy and power and theologically called it Manifest Destiny. The other is a liberal appearing form of evil. It speaks in terms of the rule of law and democracy but lacks in each. It forms alliances internationally with other flawed liberal-appearing democracies, if those governments are aligned financially and politically with its interests. It is permissive toward racism and white supremacy at home and abroad as evidenced by the massive urban "renewal" (removal) programs of the 1960s and 70s, mass incarceration that fell disproportionately on Blacks, and its support of the old racially segregated regime in South Africa or apartheid Israel today. It speaks to Blacks and other politically oppressed people in patronizing and paternalistic terms. It offers empty solutions to real problems to present themselves as magnanimous and sincere while not threatening or giving away their own grip on power. We have had to constantly organize against and challenge this evil, endeavoring to bend it toward justice or break it. One evil is clothed in the hatred and imperialism of old, and the other, though bad, was the lesser of evils that represented a dynamic that the Black community always had to live and struggle with. Again, people did not and could not hear our counsel to stand and fight another day rather than to lose and have it all taken away by madmen unapologetically bent on a white agenda in a white world.
We recognized who and what the Trump-MAGA movement is and what it meant for the safety of the Black community. We also knew intuitively that the safety of the Black community also meant the safety of all our allies, whether those allies were real or not. Black people could see the writing on the walls because we have heard all the rhetoric before lingering in the air and echoing through the cobwebbed hallways of racial struggle that unfortunately is not only of the past but in the present.
We are startled to think that people are still deluded by myths of democracy and think the system is well-meaning. People believe in the kindness of the system only because the legacies of enslavement, exploitation, and genocide are ignored along with the continuing effects of those legacies. The banning of books, the discarding of photographs showing images of Black people and women, the erasing of history, and the castigation of Critical Race Theory are calculated programs to further sanitize the foul odors of the country's past and present. Given all those factors it should be no surprise that Trump was able to declare victory because of a combination of arguments and reasons that were woven from the torn mythologized fabric of America's illusion of democracy and its altruism. We were surprised and shocked by what appeared to be a betrayal by people and movements that we considered to be part of the wall guarding against the re-entrenchment of racism, misogyny, hatred, xenophobia, and white supremacy. We were surprised, in shock, bewildered, and astonished by people who did not recognize the historical language of racism or the vicious actions that would ensue from it. The feelings of betrayal are real but are also shallow and misguided.
The sense of betrayal and alienation plays into the hands of the forces dismantling DEI, deporting immigrants, curbing First Amendment rights, and flagrantly violating the rule of law. They were able to get elected because they fostered spears of division that separated us over gender, race, and economics. Their strategy worked superbly. Our unity is our strength. If we don't join together in this current crisis and the battles to come but sit on the sidelines licking our wounds, continuing to feel offended and betrayed, then the forces of oppression win.
Let's admit that we have all been played, and their agenda was to play us against one another, fracturing votes over one issue or another and splintering one constituency group from the other until the numbers secured their victory. We have been played, and it is important for us to remember that the political game of fascism will have its way with us if we decide to sit out the various movements that attempt to resist this currently hostile order. Let's get over it and get back to work. This means that we must support one another from federal workers to Palestine, from Black Lives and reparations to LGBTQIA Rights, from immigrants to the rights of foreign students to study and speak out. All the issues are mine. And all the issues must be ours. We must support one another and join together so that no one is left out or behind. As Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emma Lazarus said similarly, "No one is free until everyone is free."
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