As comedian Larry David reminded Saturday Night Live viewers over the weekend, many people by now know how proud the Bernie Sanders campaign is for having built its entire campaign war chest by securing nearly 3.5 million individual donations, mostly from small donors averaging gifts of about $27, while refusing the support of super PAC contributions.
Meanwhile, according to a new independent analysis of campaign finance data published Monday by Politico, the 100 biggest spenders during this campaign season—many of them individual billionaires—have donated a combined $195 million to super PACs supporting the other presidential candidates.
The math is easy, but compared to the average donation celebrated by Sanders, the contrast is stark: $27 vs. $1,950,000.
As the news outlet notes, these 100 top donors have given significantly more in total than “the $155 million spent by the two million smallest donors combined.” This display exemplifies exactly what Sanders and other critics of the current campaign finance system say when they describe how a “rigged economy,” which has fueled such an unequal distribution of wealth, is also corrupting the U.S. democratic system.
With only Sanders opting out of the super PAC system for the 2016 election, it has been his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and the numerous members of the Republican field which have reaped the financial rewards of these mega-donors.
As Politico reports:
The analysis found that the leading beneficiaries of checks from the top 100 donors were Jeb Bush’s floundering campaign for the GOP nomination (a supportive super PAC received $49 million from donors on the list), Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton (super PACs dedicated to her raised $38 million from top 100 donors) and Ted Cruz’s insurgent GOP campaign ($37 million).
In fact, despite his attacks on his party’s donor class and his party’s establishment, Cruz, the Texas senator who won last week’s Iowa caucuses, appears to have locked down the support of four of the top six donors ― the Wilks family of Cisco, Texas (the No. 1 donor on POLITICO’s list), New York hedge fund tycoon Bob Mercer (No. 2), Texas energy investor Toby Neugebauer (No. 4) and Illinois manufacturing moguls Dick and Liz Uihlein (No. 6) ― but only one other donor on the list.
Conversely, a super PAC supporting Cruz’s GOP rival Marco Rubio raised only $22 million from POLITICO’s list, but the Florida senator appears to have the support of 14 of the top 100 donors, suggesting his ultra-rich supporters might be willing to spend even more to support him if he survives his widely panned Saturday night debate performance and emerges as the establishment’s best bet to knock off Cruz and national GOP polling leader Donald Trump.