If you want to know who the biggest midterms loser is, that is, of course, Donald Trump. But the second-biggest loser is the oligarchy.
Democrats aren’t strangers to the oligarchy, especially in Silicon Valley, but lately even tech billionaires heavily favor Republicans, on whom oligarchs spent an awful lot of money only to see them lose big. At the moment, it looks as though Democrats spent more overall, because individual Democratic candidates outraised individual Republican candidates. (The final tally may tell a different story.) But oligarchs seldom give to individual candidates, because within a given cycle no donor may give more than $7000 to a particular candidate. For oligarchs, candidate contributions are a quaint petit-bourgeois pastime (much like paying taxes). Your oligarch would much rather spend outside money—the “independent expenditures” that the Supreme Court pretends lie outside the control of candidates and parties—because there are no spending limits, and because it’s more strategic.
In the 2026 midterms, Republicans spent $360 million more outside money than Democrats. And yet they lost.
The outside spending vehicle that oligarchs love best is the super PAC. Looking just at super PACs, Republicans spent $670 million more than Democrats. Elon Musk alone spent at least $414 million on Republican super PACs (out of the $474 million that The New York Times calculates he dropped on the midterms overall). The final super PAC tally will likely show a much larger Republican advantage among super PACs and outside money generally. Yet the super PACs, which is to say the oligarchy, got beat.
Super PAC spending seldom gets beat. In 2024, everybody remembers that Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party outraised their Republican counterparts, and that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris astounded the world by raising $1 billion in three months. Yet Harris lost! Less-well remembered is that Republican super PACs outspent their Democratic counterparts to the tune of 65 percent to 29 percent. (My definition of “Democratic” and “Republican” super PACs includes PACS that officially only “lean” Democratic or Republican.) Similarly, in 2016, Hillary Clinton famously outraised Trump two to one. Yet Hillary lost! In that race, Republican super PACs outspent Democratic super PACs 57 percent to 41 percent.
Some might argue that the super PAC steamroller got beat in the 2018 midterms. Republican super PACs outspent Democratic ones 53 percent to 42 percent, and yet the Democrats regained a House majority. But the presidential party always loses some ground in a midterm election, and in the Senate that year Republicans held on to their majority and gained two seats. So, it was really a tie. Before last week, this decade’s only true super PAC defeat was in 2020, when Republican super PACs outspent Democratic ones 56 percent to 43 percent and yet Trump lost. But in that instance, it took a badly mishandled deadly pandemic to defeat the mighty super PACs.
This year, by contrast, all it took to beat the super PACs was having Trump back in the White House.
It would be inaccurate to say that money lost in 2026 because Democrats spent more ($5.5 billion) than Republicans ($5.12 billion), though, again, we don’t yet have a final tally. But oligarch money lost big. According to the nonprofit Open Secrets (on which I rely for most of the figures in this article), in the six Senate battleground states where Democrats have thus far won—Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas—”the more reliable predictor was candidate fundraising.” In all six, Open Secrets continued, “the candidate who raised more direct contributions defeated an opponent who often benefited from substantially greater outside support.” In other words, it wasn’t just ordinary voters who defeated the oligarchs; it was also those petit bourgeois direct contributors with whom no self-respecting oligarch would be caught dead.
In some of these races, it wasn’t just oligarch money that lost, but money, period. In Texas, where Elon Musk spent $224 million trying to elect the Republican crook Ken Paxton, Paxton had twice as much outside spending as the Democrat, James Talerico, and as a consequence Paxton spent more overall. Yet Paxton lost. The same pattern held for the defeated Republican opponents of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Troy Jackson in Maine.
The oligarchs didn’t lose everywhere. Among billionaire candidates, the results were mixed. Governor JB Pritzker (net worth: $4.2 billion, per Forbes) won re-election in Illinois. Then again, Pritzker is a Democrat, and therefore suspect. More conventionally partisan oligarchs Vivek Ramaswamy (net worth: $2.3 billion, per Forbes) and Rick Jackson (net worth: $1 billion, per Forbes) lost their Republican bids for Ohio and Georgia governor, respectively.
The oligarchs scored a likely victory in California, where Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time five percent wealth tax, appears to be going down, with an incomplete tally of 55 percent to 45 percent. According to Politico, at least 30 California billionaires, primarily from tech, spent more than $293 million to defeat the measure. But let’s face it, Prop 40 was never a great idea.
A more worrisome oligarch victory is California’s likely passage of Proposition 42, which was intended to cancel Proposition 40 if it passed. Now that Proposition 40 hasn’t passed, Proposition 42 can still do damage by blocking much more modest taxes on “business holdings, intellectual property and financial assets,” according to the nonprofit news website Cal Matters. Narrowly tailored wealth taxes are an accepted fact of daily life; in addition to property taxes, an official state analysis of the measure points out, California charges vehicle license fees for cars. Barring the state from applying such fees to other types of assets will impose yet another burden on a tax system that’s still encumbered by property and assessment rate caps created half a century ago in the madness that was Proposition 13.
A modest progressive silver lining to the California midterm referenda is that Proposition 3, which would extend indefinitely an existing surtax on incomes exceeding $371,000 for individuals and $743,000 for couples, appears to have passed. Most of the funds go to K-12 public schools. And, happily, Proposition 41, a second billionaire-funded measure intended to undo California’s wealth tax if it passed–but which, if it didn’t pass, still threatened to tie up the state’s fiscal decisionmaking in pointless audits–appears to have lost.
More good news (therefore bad news for oligarchs): In Washington state, Initiative 645, which would have repealed a 9.9 percent tax on individual and household income exceeding $1 million per year and prohibited future taxes on income, failed, and in Colorado, Initiative 195, which replaced the state’s 4.4 percent flat personal and corporate income tax rate with graduated (that is, progressive) rates, appears to have passed. In addition, Utah’s Constitutional Amendment B, which imposed an insane 60 percent supermajority requirement on raising taxes by ballot initiative, failed. Oligarchs can take heart, however, that Iowa’s Constitutional Amendment 1, which imposed am even more insane 75 percent supermajority on raising taxes in the state legislature, passed.
Apart from losing the House and Senate, the worst news for oligarchs in Tuesday’s election was passage of Montana Iniaitive 194 by a margin of 31 points. This is a deliberate and highly laudable assault on the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. Citizens United struck down a longstanding prohibition against corporations making independent expenditures to support political candidates or parties. That led to lower-court rulings striking down many other restrictions on independent spending, which in turn opened the floodgates to the oligarchs’ beloved super PACs. Montana Initiative 194 is, among other things, a powerful vote of no-confidence in the Roberts court from a red state that Trump won in 2024 by 20 points (though Montana just elected Sam Forstag, a former union leader who campaigned from the left, to one of its two House seats).
Montana has been fighting Citizens United from the start. A year after the decision, its state Supreme Court reaffirmed a 1912 state statute that barred corporations from political giving. The United States Supreme Court struck that ruling down in 2012, prompting voters to pass I-166, which re-imposed the prohibition and called for a constitutional amendment to nullify Citizens United. I-166 passed by an even wider margin than the latest measure, 75 percent to 25 percent. But in 2013 it was struck down in state court.
Montana Initiative 194 follows a new strategy of marshaling the very traditional state power to incorporate. Go ahead and contribute to candidates and parties, the new law tells corporations (also non-profits, trusts, trade associations, unincorporated associations—anything classified as an “artificial person”). But if you do so, forget about doing business in Montana. “Corporations, LLCs, and other artificial entities are creations of state law, and Montana can define the powers they receive,” argued the supporters of Initiative 194. “Those powers do not include spending money to influence Montana elections.” Montana is actually the second state to enact such a law; Hawaii was the first, earlier this year, when its Democratic state legislature adopted Senate Bill 2471. Governor Josh Green, also a Democrat, signed it into law in May.
“This is not going to stop Elon Musk from writing a big fat check to some election in Montana,” Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who developed this legal strategy, told Fortune. “What it will stop them from doing is laundering the money through a dark money group,” because such groups will not be permitted to do business in Montana. The Supreme Court, according to Moore, can rule that a corporation may give political money. But it can’t decide what gets to be a corporation in the first place. “For more than two centuries,” Moore writes, “the power to build them—to define their form, limits, and privileges—has belonged to the states and only to the states.” Put that in your originalist pipe and smoke it.
Hawaii’s S.B. 2471 is the subject of two legal challenges in federal court, one of them by the United States Chamber of Commerce. We’re no doubt seconds from the Chamber suing Montana as well. I am not a lawyer and won’t predict the outcome. But at least within the electoral realm, oligarchs are losing control over this issue much as they’ve lost control over the composition of Congress. They won’t stay down forever, of course. But let’s savor it while we can, and think about other ways to take back our country not just from Trump, but also from Elon and the rest of the Forbes 400.
