Thousands of industry donors poured more than $425 million into this year’s general election, mostly supporting the Republican Party and its promises to roll back regulations and cut taxes.
Many companies have resisted President Joe Biden’s regulatory agenda over the past four years, and nearly every sector is salivating at the prospect of bigger profits as negotiations on a massive tax package resume.
On the other hand, Democrats, who had campaigned on raising corporate taxes and reining in big business, received only 36 percent of industry contributions—64 percent of which went to winning candidates. Some of the biggest donors there came from the health and labor sectors, including big spenders from union-backed PACs and Planned Parenthood. These two sectors posted the worst win rates after spending a combined $28.5 million in support of Vice President Kamala Harris.
POLITICO looked at data from 2,400 corporate PACs, 39 super PACs with industry ties, and donations from CEOs of 100 major U.S. companies.
Some of the highest-spending industries were funded by a handful of wealthy donors like Elon Musk, who wanted to improve their bottom lines by electing like-minded lawmakers. And not every industry got a good return on the huge amount it invested.
Dive into the data showing the business world’s biggest winners and losers, and why three groups stood out:
Financial services, fueled by tens of millions of dollars in spending by the cryptocurrency industry, were one of the most notable winners on Election Day. The industry pumped $146 million into elections – and when investments were made in specific races, 87 percent of that expenditure went to the eventual winners.
The money helped return Donald Trump to the White House and bring Republicans to power in both chambers of Congress, where the financial industry is counting on the Republican Party to launch a sweeping deregulation campaign and a new round of tax breaks for the business community and the top will implement. earners.
The election results especially brought a huge reward to the crypto sector, whose super PACs helped unseat one of the sector’s most powerful critics in Congress, Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).
Defend American Jobs, one of three crypto-backed super PACs, spent a total of $60.1 million funding the Republican winners, most of which backed Brown’s challenger, Bernie Moreno.
But crypto hasn’t just driven out a top enemy. The money also helped elect what advocates are calling the most crypto-friendly Congress ever, with industry allies poised to be the ones to shape new laws that would regulate digital assets.
Protect Progress, a sister PAC of Defend American Jobs, has spent $21 million supporting Democratic Senate candidates Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego, both of whom voted for industry-backed legislation while serving in the House of Representatives.
“There will be more than 200 pro-crypto representatives” in the House of Representatives, noted Josh Fendrick, a former in-house lobbyist for Coinbase, a crypto exchange that has funneled more than $73 million to the industry’s super PACs. The industry’s investments in Senate races, he added, have also “delivered results[d] their intended outcomes.”
Although the transportation sector was nominally the second-biggest spender in the election, the designation is down to just one man: Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and now a Trump acolyte.
Of the $140 million spent by transportation interests this cycle, Musk accounts for $133.2 million, thanks to his role as CEO of the electric vehicle maker.
The employee-funded corporate PAC of Musk’s space company SpaceX, meanwhile, was the transportation sector’s fifth-largest PAC spender in the election, handing out $317,000 to a mostly Republican slate of congressional candidates.
Musk’s personal donations are not included in the industry’s profit percentage because Musk has directed the vast majority of his spending to super PACs, such as his America PAC (to which he donated $118.6 million) and the Republicans’ campaign arms in Congress.
But there’s no denying that Musk’s investment in Trump’s victory could be invaluable to the world’s richest man.
SpaceX is already one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors. Tesla, meanwhile, has benefited enormously from federal subsidies, including during the Biden administration. Musk has called for the elimination of a tax credit aimed at boosting sales of electric vehicles — though such a move would likely further challenge Tesla’s competitors. He has also supported the withdrawal of subsidies to build out the national electric vehicle charging network, from which his company has benefited.
Last week, Trump asked Musk to co-lead a new outside group committed to reducing government spending. That could mean eliminating what Musk sees as red tape that is hampering some of his business interests, which also include a satellite internet service, social media platform X and an AI startup. Musk has long complained about bureaucratic hurdles that bedevil his companies, regularly accusing regulators of retaliation for his political views.
Regardless of Musk’s personal political spending, the rest of the transportation industry saw one of the highest returns on its investments during the election, with 93.8 percent of industry spending supporting the winners.
There is some overlap between Musk’s interests and those of the broader transportation industry, albeit for different reasons. The airline industry, for example, has criticized the Biden administration’s consumer protection rules and efforts to curb so-called junk fees. In addition to eagerly awaiting Trump’s moves on electric cars, the auto industry will be paying close attention to the president-elect’s trade policies to ensure that auto parts are not torn around the world over tariffs.
The labor movement suffered one of the biggest flops of the election, with labor groups spending only 44 percent of their $70 million to support candidates who won. That’s not entirely surprising for an election in which Labor’s allies in the Democratic Party lost both the White House and Senate majorities and failed to regain the House of Representatives, but the disparity in the party’s winning percentage sector is large.
Biden introduced a number of progressive labor policies, including rules allowing gig workers to be classified as employees, a ban on non-compete clauses in contracts and stricter safety standards for workers.
Many of these claims have either been successfully blocked by the business community in court or will almost certainly be reversed by the Trump administration and Congress.
Vice President Kamala Harris benefited by far the most from the labor spending, with a total of $25 million supporting her campaign. For Our Future, a super PAC and labor’s largest spender, spent $5.5 million in support of Harris.
After Harris, the second biggest beneficiary of labor money was Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who lost to Republican Dave McCormick. Labor groups spent $3.9 million to boost Casey, including $1.6 million from For Our Future.
Labor’s other big losers were Brown, who benefited from $2.2 million in labor spending, including $1 million from a leading nurses’ union, and former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), whose race earned $1.8 million in labor expenditure.
Paroma Soni, Sean McMinn, Andrew Milligan, Madi Alexander and Jessie Blaeser contributed to this report.
