Some of the richest people in the US have spent unprecedented sums of money to influence the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections, and a Sunday report in The New York Times estimated that the top 20 biggest donors alone have spent a combined $2 billion in federal races this cycle. The single largest funder of the 2026 midterms, by a…
Page F133From§Eachthe morning edition — 2 November 2026
Guardian op-ed teaches readers to fight dark money a day after a $2 billion count of it.
As it ran on the front
The filing cabinet for this story gets a new drawer every few weeks, and every drawer holds the same kind of folder.
In September, Republican senators objected on the floor that a taxpayer-funded ad looked like campaign spending dressed in federal letterhead. Within the week, the same donor logic surfaced where it is harder to disguise: a firm owned by a Republican megadonor landed a $6.6 billion defense shipyard contract without the donor's name on either the company filing or the contract. Two days after that, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Republicans were mismanaging their own money in New York's House races — proof that even the party spending it does not always know where it went.…
…(cont) Sunday, The New York Times ran the reconciliation. The top twenty donors to the 2026 midterms, taken together, account for $2 billion in federal races — a sum that makes the Wisconsin transfer look like a rounding error, and makes clear the error was never the point. Elon Musk alone has put in nearly $450 million, by the Times' count, the single largest sum by a wide margin. Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein gave $150 million. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz gave $116 million. Hedge fund investor Jeff Yass completed the five. All five back Republicans. All five dwarf the anonymous-money count the Times had run back in August — at least $1 billion then — and this time the money came with names attached, which turns out not to matter: naming the donor does not slow the donor down.
Monday, the Guardian ran a column titled "How you (yes you) can fight dark money in elections." It arrived one day after the ledger closed on $2 billion from twenty names, five of them public. The gap between the headline and the total is not a contradiction, hon. It is the business model: tell the reader there is something they can do, the same week the filing shows there is nothing left on the board for them to outspend.
“They print a pamphlet on fighting dark money the same week twenty guys account for two billion dollars of it — that's not a how-to, that's a smoke machine. Half that money isn't even dark anymore, it's got Elon Musk's name right on it, and it still doesn't matter, because naming the donor doesn't cap the donor. Good luck outspending that with a Guardian column, pal — the only thing that slips here is the idea you were ever in the race.”
“This is just robust civic participation — Elon Musk, the Uihleins, they're exercising their First Amendment rights same as anybody with a lemonade stand... okay, a lemonade stand that moves $450 million, that's not — did I say lemonade stand? Strike that. Point is, disclosed money is the system working, and nobody's forcing the Guardian's readers not to start their own super PAC.”
Earlier in this story
- Wisconsin nonprofit's 'educational' $20,000 transfer and Anduril's $6.6 billion shipyard use the same donor-anonymity trick By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 1 November 2026
The receipts
Corporations and tech moguls have spent billions to push provocative – and often inaccurate – political ads for far too long Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Katie Phang argued that the Epstein files are a midterms sledgehammer .…
· The DNC Fight to Ban Dark Money in Presidential Primaries from the morgue, 13 Oct 2026
· ‘The Least Transparent Midterm’: How Dark Money Is Washing Over the 2026 Election from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.