A Quarter of Trump's Campaign Cash Came From Millionaires. Here's What They Want in Return.
As he's packed his proposed Cabinet with wealthy white men, President-elect Donald Trump has been criticized for assembling an administration that doesn't look like America, much less the "forgotten men and women" on whose behalf he claimed to have campaigned. But perhaps it's not too surprising that a Trump White House will represent the people who really bankroll American politics.
"Whose Voice, Whose Choice?", a new report published today by the progressive think tank Demos, provides a remarkably detailed examination of who funds our elections and how this small, elite "donor class" exerts outsized influence on presidential and congressional politics. "Though history will consider 2016 one of America's most extraordinary elections, one thing remained unchanged: presidential donors were white, male and wealthy," the report's authors write.
[...]To complete their analysis, the report's authors—Sean McElwee, a policy analyst at Demos, and Brian Schaffner and Jesse Rhodes, both political scientists from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst—cross referenced FEC data with surveys conducted by the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies and personal records compiled by Catalist, a data vendor.
Even if you already thought our campaign finance system is broken, their results are striking.[...]
