Money in Politics and the Hypocrisy of the Left

by Steven Hayward in Campaign finance regulation

As I eagerly await the daily announcement from the media and the organized Left about the latest purported outrage of the Koch brothers spending money on politics, it is worth taking in the data compiled by the lefty Center for Responsive Politics about the top donors to political campaigns. The data on campaign spending from 1989-2014 show that all of the lefty talk about “corporate money” in politics is a smoke screen: the largest donors are labor unions and left-leaning grassroots groups. In fact, the number one donor is Act Blue, which hasn’t been around all that long.
The screen cap below shows the top 15 political donors. Eleven of the 15 tilt Democratic while none tilt Republican, and nine of them are labor unions, with the second largest political donor being the giant public employee union, AFSCME. Koch Industries comes in way down at 59^th place on the list.
Pretty clear that all of the noise about the Koch Brothers and corporate money in politics generally has one objective in mind: force out any money that might even marginally detract from the drive for liberal power. Act blue indeed.