Case Study 02 — The 2024 Election as a Money-in-Politics Laboratory

The 2024 federal cycle was the most expensive election in American history by every available measure. It is also the cleanest available natural experiment for testing the propositions in this chapter. This case study walks through the 2024 cycle's spending patterns, mega-donor concentrations, small-donor pipelines, and outcomes — not to render a partisan verdict, but to assess what the data shows and does not show about whether money "decides" American elections.

Total spending: the headline number

Across all sources — candidates, parties, PACs, super PACs, 527s, and disclosed (c)(4) political activity — the 2024 federal cycle's combined spending reached approximately $15–20 billion, depending on which categorizations and inclusions analysts use. The Campaign Finance Institute's mid-cycle estimate, OpenSecrets's post-cycle analysis, and the FEC's aggregate filings all converge on figures in this range. By comparison, the 2020 cycle ran roughly $14 billion, the 2016 cycle approximately $6.5 billion, and the 2012 cycle approximately $6.3 billion. The 2024 cycle was nominally and inflation-adjustedly the most expensive in American history. The trajectory is sharply upward.

The growth is not concentrated in one category. Candidate committees grew, party spending grew, and outside spending grew — but outside spending grew the most. Outside-group spending in competitive Senate races as a share of total race spending exceeded 40% in several contests, the largest such share on record.

Presidential cycle: the Harris and Trump operations

The 2024 presidential cycle pitted Vice President Kamala Harris (after President Joe Biden's withdrawal in July 2024) against former President Donald Trump. Each campaign and its allied super PACs and party committees combined to spending operations totaling several billion dollars on each side.

On the Democratic-aligned side, the Future Forward USA Action super PAC was the largest single outside-spending vehicle, raising and spending more than $700 million across the cycle. The Harris Victory Fund (a joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee and state parties) brought in record-shattering totals in the months immediately after Biden's withdrawal. Major individual donors included Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna (through Future Forward), and others described in the chapter.

On the Republican-aligned side, Make America Great Again Inc. (the Trump-aligned super PAC) spent over $400 million across the cycle. Preserve America PAC and other allied vehicles added substantially. America PAC, an independent-expenditure operation funded primarily by Elon Musk, spent more than $200 million on field operations and digital outreach in swing states. Other major individual donors included Timothy Mellon (with multiple nine-figure transfers to MAGA Inc.), Miriam Adelson (continuing the Adelson family's role from prior cycles), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, and Ken Griffin (whose support shifted across vehicles during the cycle).

The honest summary: both sides had multi-billion-dollar combined operations. Both sides had named mega-donors writing nine-figure checks. The financial architecture was symmetric in structure even where partisan totals differed in any specific cycle.

Senate races: the most expensive contests in American history

Several 2024 Senate races set or approached spending records. Ohio (Brown v. Moreno): combined spending exceeded $400 million, including more than $200 million in outside spending alone. Sherrod Brown lost to Bernie Moreno despite a narrow Democratic spending advantage. Pennsylvania (Casey v. McCormick): combined spending exceeded $300 million; Casey lost narrowly. **Montana (Tester v. Sheehy):** combined spending around $300 million in a state of slightly over one million people; Tester lost. Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona: all reached $150–250 million combined.

The candidate-level pattern is mixed. Democratic incumbents in tough states (Brown, Casey, Tester) generally outraised their challengers but lost the seats. Conversely, in Maryland, Democratic spending dwarfed Republican spending (a heavily Democratic state) and the Democratic candidate won predictably. The simple "money buys elections" model fails: the candidates who outspent their opponents lost some of the most expensive races in the cycle.

House races: structural advantage and limited responsiveness

In House races, the relationship between spending and outcomes is filtered through the structural features documented in Chapter 35 (gerrymandering): most House districts are not competitive in November regardless of money. In the small set of genuinely competitive House districts, both parties spent heavily, total per-race spending in the most contested districts reached $20–50 million combined, and the outcomes were determined by a combination of spending, candidate quality, district fundamentals, and national political tide.

The 2024 House cycle's structural pattern: competitive races where money mattered at the margin, dozens of safe-seat races where money was raised and spent but did not affect outcomes, and a handful of upsets (in both directions) that demonstrated money's limits.

The small-donor pipeline at scale

ActBlue and WinRed both processed historic volumes in 2024. ActBlue reported processing more than $2 billion in contributions across associated committees during the cycle (with the post-Biden-withdrawal surge being particularly dramatic; the highest single-day total in ActBlue's history was reported in late July 2024). WinRed processed comparable totals on the Republican side, having largely closed the structural fundraising gap that motivated its launch in 2019.

The small-donor share of candidate committee fundraising in 2024 hit a new record. Several Senate and House campaigns reported small-donor shares above 40% of total receipts. At the presidential level, small donors funded a substantial portion of the Harris campaign's late-cycle media buys. The post-2008 trajectory toward small-donor democratization continues; it has not been reversed by the post-2010 emergence of mega-donor super PACs. Both phenomena are real, simultaneous, and growing.

Did the most-spent-on candidates win?

This is the question political-finance reporters are asked most often, and the honest answer is: sometimes, but not reliably. A more precise answer:

• In races between candidates of similar quality and partisan tilt, the candidate who outspends their opponent tends to win — but this is largely because spending correlates with candidate quality, fundraising ability, and competitive positioning, not because money is decisive. Strong candidates raise more money; well-positioned races attract more money; the correlation is largely endogenous.
• In races where the candidate-quality and partisan-tilt variables are controlled for, the marginal effect of money is real but modest. Adam Bonica's empirical work (using the DIME database) and others' have estimated effects on the order of single-digit-percentage-point shifts at high levels of spending differentials.
• In structurally non-competitive races (deep-red or deep-blue districts), money largely does not affect the outcome.
• In races with strong national tides, money can be overwhelmed by the tide. Several 2024 Senate races demonstrated this: Democratic incumbents who outspent their opponents lost to Republican challengers riding the cycle's overall Republican tide.

The fair summary: money matters at the margin in competitive races, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to win. The "money buys elections" framing misstates the empirical relationship.

What controlled studies show

Beyond the cycle-level pattern, controlled studies are useful. Field experiments on the marginal effect of additional advertising spending (Broockman, Kalla, others) consistently find small but real effects, on the order of 1–3 percentage points of vote share per significant spending differential. Longitudinal work on advertising tone, message targeting, and media-mix optimization shows that how money is spent matters at least as much as how much. Heterogeneous effects across demographic groups, partisanship, and media consumption habits further complicate the picture.

The bottom line from the controlled-study literature: money has a real effect on vote share at the margin, but the effect is smaller than the popular framing assumes, and the effect is dwarfed by candidate quality, district fundamentals, and the national political environment in most contested races.

What 2024 tells us — and doesn't

The 2024 cycle confirmed several things and unsettled others.

Confirmed: Total spending continues to rise. Outside-group spending continues to grow as a share of competitive-race totals. Both parties have mega-donor classes. Both parties have small-donor pipelines. The structural shift produced by Citizens United and SpeechNow is a permanent feature of the system.

Unsettled or surprising: Several of the most expensive races went to the lower-spending candidate. The corporate independent-expenditure flood predicted by Citizens United critics has continued to under-deliver, with most outside spending coming from individual mega-donors rather than corporate treasuries. Small-donor fundraising has continued to grow rather than being eclipsed by outside-group spending. The relationship between money and outcomes is, if anything, looser in 2024 than in some prior cycles.

Where the money went: spending categories

A useful breakdown of how the 2024 cycle's spending was deployed, since the totals can otherwise feel abstract. The largest single spending category remained television advertising — broadcast and cable combined accounted for roughly 40–45% of major-race expenditures. Digital advertising (programmatic display, search, social-media platforms) reached roughly 25–30%, the highest digital share in any prior cycle. Direct mail, traditionally a major category, has declined to under 10% in most federal races. Field operations (canvassers, door-to-door, voter contact) accounted for roughly 10–15%, with significant variation by campaign. Polling, consulting, and overhead made up the remaining roughly 5–10%.

The shift toward digital is structural and is reshaping the campaign-finance ecosystem. Digital ads are easier to micro-target, harder to monitor (an ad seen by one demographic slice may never be observed by reporters or opposition researchers), and faster to deploy. Several of the largest 2024 outside-spending operations focused disproportionately on digital, including Future Forward USA Action's late-cycle digital push and America PAC's swing-state digital and field combination.

Coordination questions

The 2024 cycle saw multiple high-profile examples of operational closeness between super PACs and the campaigns they supported. Make America Great Again Inc., Trump campaign leadership, and the Republican National Committee were widely reported to share strategic discussions, vendors, and creative materials in ways that — if they crossed the legal line into coordination — would convert independent expenditures into illegal in-kind contributions. The FEC did not act. Similar patterns existed on the Democratic side, with Future Forward USA Action and the Harris campaign reportedly aligning closely on messaging and timing. The post-cycle complaint backlog at the FEC is substantial; few complaints have produced enforcement action. Whether 2024's coordination patterns prompt structural reform of the FEC remains an open question heading into 2026.

The honest summary for civic education: the 2024 election was the most expensive in history, the structural patterns predicted by both critics and defenders of the post-2010 regime were partly visible, and the overall outcome depended on factors much more complicated than a simple "money decides" or "money doesn't matter" story. The truth is in between, and that is the truth a serious citizen has to hold.