This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing Swamp Notes podcast episode: How money is shaping the 2024 US election
Marc Filippino
After the January 6th insurrection in 2021, a lot of rich people took a hard line against then President Trump, but now it looks like he may just lock up the Republican nomination. And some wealthy donors are saying that what’s a little insurrection between friends? This is Swamp Notes, the weekly US politics podcast from the FT News Briefing, where we talk about all of the things happening in 2024 and the US presidential election. I’m Marc Filippino, and this week we’ll look at big business and their complicated relationship with Trump. Here with me today is Alex Rogers. He covers campaign finance for the FT. Hey, Alex.
Alex Rogers
Hey, Marc.
Marc Filippino
And we’ve also got Ed Luce on the line. He’s our US political columnist, who wouldn’t you know it, also co-authors our Swamp Notes newsletter with Rana Foroohar. Hey Ed.
Ed Luce
Yeah, good to be with you.
Marc Filippino
So Ed a lot of donors distanced themselves from Trump after he lost the 2020 election and then the failed January 6th insurrection. They’re now coming back to him. What does that show us?
Ed Luce
What it shows is two things. One, that they are gaming this out and saying that Trump maybe has a 50-50 chance of being president. And two, therefore, as stewards of their businesses, of their banks, their companies, whatever they might be, they need to hedge their bets because Trump is somebody who not only rewards friends but punishes enemies. He tried to impose, you know, double UPS rates on Amazon deliveries to punish Jeff Bezos because Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which was critical of Trump. He tried to get the DOJ to block the Time-Warner merger with AT&T because CNN had allegedly been harmful to Trump. And so, while Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, you know what the US Chamber of Commerce and others are doing is telling Trump they’re not his enemies. They’re saying, okay, now January 6th is over. We all condemned it. We all thought it was an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order. That’s over. We’ve now got to hedge and insure ourselves against an angry Trump.
Alex Rogers
And another example just this week of Wall Street hedging its bets, Ken Griffin announced that he gave $5mn to Nikki Haley super PAC. And then in the same interview on CNBC said, didn’t we all feel safer under Trump? You know, he praised Haley, but then immediately said that her path to the GOP nomination is narrower than it was eight weeks ago, and essentially stepped on his own announcement about Nikki Haley.
Marc Filippino
So are people like Ken Griffin? He’s the founder of the hedge fund Citadel. Are they worried about tying themselves in knots and basically contradicting themselves when they do things like this?
Alex Rogers
I’m not sure if he’s worried about tying himself into knots, but he definitely did. I mean, what he could have done in January or in December when he gave these donations is announced to the world that I’m supporting Nikki Haley as the Republican alternative to Donald Trump. Instead, he waited until this week when the filing deadline happens and you have to disclose who your donors are, to announce what he did in the past, and then acknowledge that after Iowa and New Hampshire, where Nikki Haley lost by over 30 points and 11 points, that her path to the nomination is narrow. And so it just it’s an odd PR strategy if you’re trying to play at this level.
Ed Luce
Griffin you know, he moved to Florida partly to escape the Illinois notorious sort of Chicago regulatory environment, maybe for the weather, but very clearly to back DeSantis. So this guy is sort of hopped from one option to the other. Now that Trump is the option, none of the things that the DeSantis backers were saying that we want Trumpism without Trump, we want the chaos gone. We want the personal vendetta politics gone. None of that matters. Money, money is supreme. It transcends those consistency or inconsistency considerations. If the Trump train has left the station, you want to board it.
Marc Filippino
So, Alex, your whole job is to find out who is spending how much money and on which candidates. What are the numbers look like? And in Trump’s case, what’s the money being used for?
Alex Rogers
So I think the big thing that we learned this week is that last year, pro-Trump groups spent $52mn on legal fees. And the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in terms of the cash on hand, how much money that they have going into 2024 is the same amount of money, $52mn. And so Trump’s legal battles are a double edged sword. He raises a ton of money off of all of these criminal cases and the civil case. But he also is paying off all these lawyers, and that’s sucking up a ton of cash from his campaign coffers.
Marc Filippino
What about the rest of the folks in the field? Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who’s still in the primaries, the only other person challenging Trump at this point. And Joe Biden, of course, who is the incumbent?
Alex Rogers
Yeah. So Nikki Haley raised $69mn last year, and she burnt through all but $3mn of it. She really benefited from Tim Scott and Mike Pence and DeSantis and Chris Christie all kind of falling by the wayside. And she is campaigning on to February 24th to South Carolina where she was the governor, and it does seem like she will have the money and the resources to do so. A lot of the donors who were for those other candidates have given to her, and they seem to continue to be giving to her going into South Carolina. But after that, all bets are off.
Marc Filippino
Yeah. And I think for people outside of the States, campaign finance is kind of this weird thing, right? It’s just so massive. Alex, do me a favor, feel free to jump in and explain why campaign finance is such a big deal here in the US.
Alex Rogers
Well, any individual can spend an unlimited amount of money to benefit a particular campaign. If they donate to a super PAC, they can give as much money as they’d like. The biggest, single contribution last year was a $20,000,500 donation from Robert Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites of America, to never back down the Ron DeSantis super PAC.
Marc Filippino
Okay, just pausing for a second. PACs, they stand for political action committees. They pay for ads. They pay for staff. They even pay for travel. Then there are super PACs, which is what you were talking about just there. They cannot co-ordinate decisions with a candidate, but they are super because they can raise them a tremendous amount of money. Right, Alex?
Alex Rogers
Yeah. I mean, Joe Biden was the first candidate ever to raise over $1bn in 2020, and he weighs a ton more than Trump did last cycle. But also, there are a ton of examples where candidates have raised a lot of money and still lost.
Marc Filippino
And when, frankly, Nikki Haley drops out.
Alex Rogers
Well, I do think that there have been a ton of donors who supported Tim Scott or Chris Christie, who now support Nikki Haley, and I don’t know what they do if and when she drops out, her campaign and her donors are saying that she’s going to take this all the way. But if you’re trying to game this out, if she drops out, where do they go? Clearly, they are supporting her as almost a last resort, or because they actually are hoping that she could somehow turn the party away from Donald Trump. But it’s hard to say if they’re actually going to, then go to Trump.
Ed Luce
That sounds about right. I mean, the shock of campaign finance for presidential elections, any kind of election might be, particularly to non-Americans, just how easy it is to get money into politics. That’s one reaction. And, you know, we all share that at some level. Another might be just how cheap it is to buy the federal government. You know, we’re talking about 2020. The overall cost, I think, was less than $10bn. You know, Procter and Gamble spend more than that on marketing every year. So it’s never going to be too tight an economic situation for the Jamie Diamonds of this world to to give money to a campaign.
Marc Filippino
But when you put it that way at $10bn is not a lot of money, which is kind of a crazy thing to say. All right. We’re going to take a quick break. And then when we come back, we’re going to do something that I like to call exit poll.
[PROMO FOR UNHEDGED PODCAST]
Marc Filippino
All right, We’re back. And we’re going to close out today’s show with a segment we’re calling exit poll. That’s basically where we survey our guests on a topic du jour. And today we are of course talking about Taylor Swift. The pop icon is dating American football star Travis Kelce, who will be playing at the Super Bowl next week with his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, who are playing the San Francisco 49ers. And for some reason, his relationship with Swift is making some conservatives like Sean Hannity very, very angry. So much so that some conservatives think that there is a conspiracy between the NFL and Swift so that the Chiefs win the Super Bowl. And that way she can endorse Biden and sway the election his way. Ed, you recently wrote a column about Taylor Swift, which I love. Do you think conservatives can bring her down?
Ed Luce
No, I think that they can build her up even more, if that’s possible. I think this is a pretty catastrophic misreading of how most American voters feel about Taylor Swift. She’s probably the most amenable icon to conservative- inclined families who are worried about the influence on their daughters. She doesn’t twerk. She’s not profane. She’s dating an All-American pro football star. So I think they’ve chosen the wrong target here. I don’t particularly think that celebrities have big impact on elections, but this is a sort of different level of celebrity. And to take on a celebrity over a conspiracy theory that could be disproved on February 11th at the Super Bowl, if the 49ers win. Well, that conspiracy theory doesn’t look very impressive. But if the Chiefs win, the most Americans are just going to be celebrating, you know, a celebrity couple.
Marc Filippino
But some of them will also attribute that win to Taylor Swift for for sure.
Alex Rogers
I’m just so happy that you got Ed Luce to say twerk on the air.
Marc Filippino
Yeah. Oh, yeah. In and of itself, a win. We could end it right now.
Alex Rogers
Absolutely. I will just go on the record saying that I love Taylor Swift. I am a massive, Taylor Swift fan. I am a Swiftie. And I do think that it is a mistake to go after her. You know, we’re talking about 40,000 votes in a couple different states that could flip the election. You know, she sells out stadiums that are twice that size. She is the most popular pop star on the planet. I don’t understand the strategy.
Marc Filippino
Okay, you both have answered correctly. And ensure that Taylor Swift will not come after us or the show. So I really appreciate not painting target on our back. I want to thank both of today’s guests. First, Alex Rogers, our US business and politics correspondent. Thank you Alex.
Alex Rogers
Thank you Marc.
Marc Filippino
And Ed Luce, the FT’s US political columnist, who also co-authors our Swamp Notes newsletter. Thanks so much for your time, Ed.
Ed Luce
Many thanks.
Marc Filippino
This was Swamp Notes, the US politics show from the FT News Briefing. It’s produced by Sonja Hutson and Jake Harper. I’m your host, Marc Filippino. Our executive producer is Topher Forhecz and Cheryl Brumley, is the FT’s global head of audio. Check back next week for more US political analysis from the Financial Times.
