2024 broke campaign finance milestones — and not in a good way
Amid record campaign spending in 2024, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris failed to disclose information about their top campaign fundraisers
A record $20 billion flowed into the 2024 elections, but that wasn’t the only concerning campaign finance-related milestone this election cycle.
This presidential election also marked the first time in 25 years that neither major party presidential nominee voluntarily disclosed information about their top campaign fundraisers — individuals known as “bundlers,” who are often rewarded for their fundraising prowess with special access, influence, and even appointments to plum administration positions such as ambassadorships.
For more than a year, Issue One led a crosspartisan coalition that urged the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to voluntarily identify the individuals who helped them raise large sums of money. Yet neither Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump nor Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris (nor President Joe Biden before her) did.
Political observers may not be surprised that Trump failed to disclose his bundlers. He opted against doing so during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns as well. But Harris — who released a list of more than 100 people who bundled at least $25,000 for her 2020 presidential campaign — became the first Democratic presidential nominee in the past 20 years to not voluntarily disclose information about her bundlers.
The disclosure of presidential campaign bundlers is not required by law, but during the first decade of the 21st century, it was a bipartisan tradition to voluntarily disclose presidential bundlers, and Democratic presidential nominees had continued to do so until this year.
As the New York Times explained earlier this year, the modern bundling era began in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush professionalized campaign fundraising with a program that was heavy on nicknames. Bush classified his big-money bundlers into two tiers — Pioneers (who raised at least $100,000) and Rangers (who raised at least $200,000).
At the time, presidential candidates typically participated in the public financing system created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Yet Bush began raising huge amounts of private funds in 2000 to be able to financially compete in the GOP presidential primary with publishing executive Steve Forbes, who rejected public financing and self-funded his campaign.
Fast forward to 2008 when Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama became the first major party presidential nominee to forego public financing during both the primary and general election. Obama ultimately raised nearly $750 million — and dramatically outspent his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who had forged a reputation as a campaign finance reformer and championed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which was signed into law in 2002 and banned unlimited “soft money” contributions to the political parties.
No serious presidential candidate has participated in the public financing program since, and astronomical amounts of cash from private sources have continued to flow into candidates’ war chests.
The New York Times reported that some of Obama’s bundlers raised millions of dollars for his campaigns, and an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that Obama named 31 bundlers as ambassadors during his second term in the White House.
This election cycle, media outlets reported that the Trump campaign had at least seven tiers of bundlers — from those who raised at least $15,000 (“Trump Force”) to those who raised at least $1 million (“Ultra MAGA”).
By law, the only bundlers that presidential candidates are required to disclose are those who are registered lobbyists.
This year, as Sludge previously reported, the Harris campaign disclosed just three bundlers before Election Day — all of them political action committees (PACs). One was the PAC of J Street, a pro-Israel lobbying group that positions itself as a liberal alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Comittee (AIPAC). The others were the PACs of the reproductive rights advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly known as NARAL) and the American Association for Justice, a trade association for trial lawyers.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s largest disclosed bundler before Election Day was Geoff Verhoff, a lobbyist who, as Sludge reported, advised the coal and nuclear power company FirstEnergy and who pleaded the Fifth when called to testify about his role in a bribery scheme for which the company was criminally charged. Vernoff, in recent years, has also lobbied for the governments of Cambodia and Uzbekistan. Records show he raised $3.6 million for Trump and allied groups.
Other lobbyist-bundlers for Trump included:
Brian Ballard, who Politico once called “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington” and whose more than 100 clients this year include Amazon, British American Tobacco (a subsidiary of Reynolds American), ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Comcast, DoorDash, Major League Baseball, NextEra Energy, Nippon Steel, U.S. Sugar, and the governments of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Japan, and Sudan. (Until February, Ballard also lobbied for the governments of Guatemala and Liberia.)
Jeff Miller, whose more than 60 clients this year include Altria, Amgen, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Apple, Comcast, Delta, FirstEnergy, Oracle, PG&E, PGA Tour, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), Southern Company, SpaceX, and the government of Japan.
As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump pledged to implement “a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections” as part of his promise to “drain the swamp.” But neither during his first term in office nor during his subsequent campaigns has Trump continued his advocacy for such a reform.
Alas, without the voluntary transparency embraced by his predecessors, the public remains in the dark about who else may have bundled significant sums for Trump’s campaign and what they may want in return.
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