Fifteen years after Citizens United opened elections to corporate campaign financing, Jacob Eisler asks if the ruling remains relevant after Donald Trump won in 2016 and 2024 through small donations and social media savvy rather than traditional reliance on kingmaking donors.
The 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United was roundly greeted with horror in the legal academy—and well beyond. Perhaps most infamously, President Barack Obama, in a remarkably bold move for a president widely concerned with visible compliance to norms and public decorum, criticized the Supreme Court for removing an obstacle to the influence of unequal wealth in politics. The critique of Citizens United and its kin (like McCutcheon v. FEC) is straightforward enough: such decisions allow private money to influence politics (politicians, voters, and the wider political ecosystem), and thereby allow the power of private economic inequality to contravene the norm of public democratic equality.
The most tumultuous elections in American politics in decades, however, have complicated any clear description of this narrative. In each of the three presidential elections in which he has been the Republican standard-bearer, Donald Trump has raised less money than the Democratic nominee. In each case he raised less total money and less committee money. In 2024 alone he raised more outside money—$150 million more— but still trailed President Joe Biden and, after he dropped out, Vice President Kamala by $500 million in total money raised. Furthermore, Trump was, at least for some of the presidential elections, significantly more dependent on small donors, who are typically seen as a more democratically legitimate means of fundraising. (One inference from Trump’s dependency on small donors is that it tracks a remarkable demographic trend as working-class voters drift towards the Republican Party, upending the traditional demographics of party support.) Indeed, insofar as donations that are affordable for most voters allow for indications of strength of preference as well as binary choice, small-donor campaign finance can be reconciled with some plausible theories of democratic legitimacy. While Trump may have enjoyed a slight edge in financial support from nominally independent super PACs, any such edge was far from sufficient to make up his deficit in candidate money.
This suggests that—at least by classic campaign finance theory—Trump is the more tenable candidate. He depends less on donations, and when he does receive money it tends to be, comparatively speaking, from small donors. In a dynamic of complex interactions of political appeal and economic power, any claim to genuine mass democratic support by a candidate will be somewhat muddled and contestable, and from a purist perspective any claim of legitimacy may be only comparative. But these numbers indicate that Trump can claim a certain type of democratic bonafide over his Democratic opponents. Moreover, given that private campaign finance’s impact has long been seen as a major obstacle to egalitarian process that comports with basic democratic norms, this is difficult to class as normatively trivial.
Of course, this observation is radically at odds with the wider perception of Trump in many circles, not the least being the academy. Trump has been widely identified—in terms of his particular behaviors and the wider political shifts which he has accelerated and benefited from —as a profound threat to democracy. How much of this is a matter of optics and of narrative curation can be contested, but there is no question that Trump and his constituency have contravened some democratic norms, no more visibly than in the January 6 riots challenging the results of the 2020 election and protesting Biden’s electoral victory.
This article is agnostic regarding any wider evaluation of Trumpism’s meaning in democracy, Trump’s own willingness to contravene political mores, and his significance to democracy in the national and global order. Rather, in a somewhat hermeneutic spirit, it seeks to draw out a thorny dilemma from an internal perspective: Trump is widely condemned as anti-democratic. Yet, his relationship to campaign financing (widely identified as an important feature of the landscape of democratic legitimacy and pathology) made him the more democratically legitimate candidate in all of the past three elections (at least on some meaningful metrics). Adding to the irony is that one of the institutions where Trump has had the most influence—the Supreme Court—is identified as the one responsible for creating the background regulatory environment that renders campaign finance so democratically troubling.
How can this dilemma be cracked? Perhaps the most obvious possibility is that while Trump did not necessarily dominate the formal means of obtaining disproportionate media control—that is to say, being able to purchase ads, airtime, and campaign finance support—he was able to obtain and access disproportionate media power through means that might be as troubling for his legitimacy. For example, his alliance during the 2024 election with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the owner of the X social media platform, gave Trump a publicity benefit that is, in one sense, grassroots—Trump did not buy X’s support in a purely transactional way (as far as we know)—but in another sense a function of American inequality (among other factors such as radical technological change). That Trump, upon assuming the presidency, subsequently gave Musk extraordinary power in government only further complicates the narrative, as does the fact that this entire dynamic (problematically transactional or no) occurred in plain view of the entire electorate. Trump may be many things, but surreptitious he is not.
Trump also benefited from more diffuse forms of communicative power. He demonstrated a capacity to rally his base and evoke loyalty from voters that is exceptional as a candidate and insulated him from intra-party condemnation by more traditional Republicans. His background as a prominent media figure in perhaps the gaudiest of arenas, reality television, likely gave him direct name recognition (one has to wonder if any other presidential candidate in history was as readily branded with a phrase: “You’re fired”) as well as gave him experience with leveraging an evolving media landscape. Finally, his proclivity for outrageous statements—perhaps a function of his lack of conditioning through standard professional political channels—resulted in greater, and certainly more impassioned, media coverage than most candidates. That Trump’s political career truly began by condemning Florida Governor Jeb Bush as “low energy” is not only salient as a stand-alone fact regarding the vagaries of politics and the state of political discourse, but exemplary of Trump’s unique rhetorical capacities in an age of meme-driven mass communication.
What does this mean for Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s controversial and muscular interventions into campaign finance regulation, and the relationship between money and American democracy more generally? Presuming Trump is not simply a once-in-a-lifetime anomaly of a candidate, one possibility is the limited relevance, or perhaps the coming desuetude, of traditional campaign financing and thus the conventional campaign financing regime. While it is contested if particular campaign modalities (such as television) impact overall spending levels, a fundamental transformation in campaign ecosystems (specifically their fragmentation through new media) could make financial support less relevant. In other words, the conventional anxieties regarding campaign financing may be increasingly anachronistic.
This is, however, a conceptually blindered view. The problem with campaign finance is not first-order about wealth or money, but about the intrusion of inappropriate inequalities into the political arena. The traditional font of such inequalities is plutocratic wealth, which means that electoral outcomes are overdetermined by wealthy elites, thus depriving the electorate itself of political power. Yet the possible source of such inequalities is not limited to money. If the new form of overdetermining electoral outcomes becomes access to or ability to manipulate social media platforms or the underlying technology such as algorithms, such access can become the vehicle of inequality. As such forms of influence become increasingly pervasive, sophisticated, and opaque (most recently through the rising prevalence of algorithmically generated media), they will create new opportunities for unequal influence over elections.
One possibility for addressing the pathologies of such trends is to turn away from campaign finance as narrowly conceived, and consider elections and political influence more holistically. The most obvious candidate would be anti-corruption law, which, expansively conceived, allows for conceptualization of appropriate relationships between constituents, representatives, and mechanisms that can influence undue influence on either. However, both the campaign finance jurisprudence and anti-corruption law jurisprudence have rejected expansive conceptions of corruption, making this a difficult path to forge before the current Supreme Court.
Another possibility would be increasingly nuanced and sensitive regulation of technology, though this could raise constitutional concerns regarding state suppression of speech as well as questions of regulatory capacity. Is regulatory intervention an effective or desirable mechanism for shaping the interplay between new media and popular political preferences? The efforts to regulate the more conceptually tractable influence of money on politics beginning with the 1970s Federal Election Campaign Act may have obscured the impact of money on politics, but did little to truly solve it. Attempting to apply coercive regulatory framework to limit the impact of even more intricate forms of technological influence will likely fare worse.
This last point reveals the true import of Citizens United and the importance of the fact that it is showing its age. Ultimately, campaign finance is a form of social power; so are the novel media and technological modalities that Trump seems to have effectively leveraged despite his competitive campaign finance disadvantage. So long as the basic machinery of elections— districting and ballot counting—are functional, these forms of social power operate upon the electorate. It is the ability of these forms of social power to effectively persuade that makes them relevant. Their mediation by the electorate raises the question of if regulation can effectively—and legitimately—reshape the impact of such social power, or if such dynamics can only be mediated by more foundational social reorganization. In the context of campaign finance, this would mean addressing the root inequality that produces a plutocratically structured society. In the context of emerging media and algorithmic technologies, a solution is even more tentative and obscure: it would mean emergence of appropriate interplay between personal autonomy and these unprecedented social forces.
One institution that will have to grapple with these questions, either by addressing them directly, or by studied avoidance, is the judiciary. Despite the rising inequality that has marked modern campaign finance, the dominant commitment of the John Roberts Court—epitomized by Citizens United—has been a classically liberal vision that prized the power of individuals to control their own political fates despite the presence of unequal wealth. The Court limited a governmental regulatory regime to protect this classical liberal vision. The influence of new forces—and the capacity of unaccountable elites to control them—will force the justices to grapple with the durability of such a liberal vision in light of unprecedented strain.
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Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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