Numlock Sunday: Dave Levinthal on the money corroding American politics
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Dave Levinthal who wrote Campaign finance proposals face long odds this year – with a few exceptions for OpenSecrets. Here's what I wrote about it:
A genie we let out of a bottle several years ago called “campaign finance” has attracted more and more attention from governments eyeing potential reforms. Not the federal one — for god’s sake, don’t be foolish — but in the states, there have been 319 bills pertaining to campaign finance issues across 45 states (and Guam) from January 1 through March. States like New York, Hawaii, Virginia, Minnesota and Arizona lead the pack. Most of the state-level bills are currently pending in legislative committee, but a few have actually managed to advance, including several in Virginia that show genuine promise given the state’s historical disposition toward, say, using campaign funds for personal uses. Many of the bills are about allowing the use of campaign funds for childcare expenses, which has been the case at the federal level since 2018, and hopes to facilitate more parents running for office.
Dave and I go way back, and I was delighted to see he’s kicked off a newsletter with all sorts of fun stuff, so I wanted to have him on. The money-in-politics issue is a fascinating one for me, and was an early way for me to really immerse in data journalism. Dave’s really the tip of the spear on this issue, so I was super excited to talk to him.
If this stuff interests you, Dave’s newsletter is a must-read:
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Dave Levinthal, thank you so much for coming on. It is good to talk to you again.
It is wonderful to be back talking with you.
I’m just obsessed with your beat. You and I go way back to OpenSecrets when I was a little baby intern there and you were a reporter. You’ve been on this beat just covering the intersection of American power and American wealth whether by means of campaign finance or by means of lobbying, any of this stuff for years and years and years now. Your stuff is so fascinating. I know a few weeks ago, you had this interesting story about campaign finance reform, how it is absolutely not happening at the federal level, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the states. I mean, do you want to just talk a little bit about what got you on that story?
Sure. Look, the intersection of money and politics, nobody cares about it until the entire fate of the nation seems to hinge on it. Then people really do. We’re at a moment right now where, whether it’s through the lens of oligarchy or influence peddling or billionaires who have billion-dollar contracts with the government, slashing or running aspects of the government at the same time. When you add that all up, we have a moment right now where people are paying incredible attention to this topic broadly, but doing so in very specific ways with things that are either very exciting to them or very scary to them.
So the story that you mentioned: it attempted to look at not only the federal level, but also the state level. State houses are so easily forgotten, especially when you live in Texas and you don’t care what’s going on in Vermont. Or you live in Idaho and you don’t really ever pay attention, unless you desperately have to, to what’s happening at the state level in South Carolina. But what we’ve seen is that there (perhaps not surprisingly) has been hardly any action at the state level when it comes to bills or regulations that would change the way that the money in politics is played.
But there were a couple of notable exceptions. One was a transparency measure that was floated in the state of Utah that pertained to providing more information for dark money groups. This was not floated and passed by Democrats, this was something that came out of the mind of a very conservative Republican and appears poised to be signed into law by the governor there. Also, the state of Virginia, which has been notorious for its laissez-faire money and politics rules over the many decades, has any of 6 different measures that are in the pipeline right now, ready to be signed into law that would enhance disclosure and other money in politics regulations in that state. So that has been fascinating to watch. It’ll be curious, I think, to see ultimately whether other states are going to take any types of signals because they do pay attention to each other, at least among governments, if not among citizens.
Yeah. It seems also at the state level (we’ve seen fairly acute examples of this rather recently), you don’t need to be a trillionaire in order to make a lot of hay with some money. So it’s not entirely surprising that the state-level legislators are the ones who can understand that that money can really go a long way in distorting what the playing field looks like.
It can. And Elon Musk spending millions of dollars on a Wisconsin State Supreme Court race, that’s going to get the headlines. But where 99% of elections are taking place or at the local level or at the state level. They’re for mayor, for city council, for state legislatures, for dog-catcher-like positions. All of those require money and resources to run those campaigns. As a result, many, if not all, politics are local. Then the money game truly should be local too.
Some of the efforts at the state level that you do see gaining traction either in the here and now, or in recent years have oftentimes been directed precisely at those places. That can make a big difference in the way that elections are not only run and waged, but the confidence that people have in those elections. If they feel like there is a level financial playing field and also if their money can actually make a difference. If they make a $20 or $50 or $100 donation, it’s not having to compete with somebody who is a multimillionaire or a billionaire in every case.
Yeah. Like you mentioned, nobody’s interested in campaign finance until all of a sudden they’re being bazooka’d with an amount of cash that will never be matched. It seems like finally, there’s a lot of real energy on the issue that you’ve been beating the drum on for years now.
There is. And there are a number of reasons why that has come about, but I think Elon Musk has truly changed the conversation almost single-handedly for better or for worse. He’s somebody who’s not just an incredibly wealthy individual who dumped a whole bunch of money into a super PAC that spent upward of $200 million to help elect Donald Trump president. He certainly is that, but he’s so much more, as we well know.
He’s somebody who, again, was then empowered by the president he helped elect to do things to a government that serves all Americans, in ways that are unprecedented in modern U.S. history. There’s no analog to Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency that we can point to anytime this decade or the decade before or going back for much of our lifetime. Then beyond that, he’s somebody who stands to gain or to lose billions upon billions of dollars based on the decisions that are being made in Congress and the decisions that are being made in the executive branch that he has (next to Donald Trump, probably) the most sway over at this point in time, that’s extraordinary. It’s something that when you don’t have a good parallel for that, you have to figure it out in the moment.
That’s where we’re at, right now, whether it’s people wondering, “where the heck is this going,” or journalists trying to write smart articles and investigations into the meaning of this and the precedent that this is going to set. That’s something that makes this moment and the financial and money aspects of it so beyond anything that we’ve ever really talked about before, whether it’s with George Soros or the Koch brothers or any of the left or right boogeymen from days of yore. Elon Musk single-handedly leapfrogged them in a way that is dramatic, and is setting a different standard for what it means to be a big money player in politics and government in the United States in the year.
Now, it’s a very clarifying moment. I think one thing that’s been interesting that I wanted to pick your brain about was: You have always been very intrigued by not just the passage of these laws and these attempts at reforms, but also the actual enforcement of them and how that can be rather inconsistent, frankly. The Stock Act was one of your big points of contention, where here’s this law in the books that says that members of Congress can’t trade stocks, in, in specific, using privileged information. Again, correct me if I’m wrong on the exact mechanics of it, but it is just not even slightly enforced. I think there have been a lot of surprises lately (particularly some stuff around Elon in Wisconsin). There's potentially some laws being violated, but there’s not really a way to directly enforce them sometimes, it seems. So, I guess I’d just throw it out there. I’m really interested in your thoughts on the enforcement quandary of laws that sensibly cover some of our most powerful people.
Yeah. You can pass all the laws in the world. If the enforcement mechanism is weak or toothless or the enforcers don’t enforce the laws, then you have a pretty significant problem. I think we’ve seen this in the money realm and the ethics realm in a number of different ways.
You brought up one that is incredibly close to my heart, which is the personal finances of public officials. You and I worked together at the Business Insider on a project, “A Conflicted Congress” that was able to reveal literally dozens upon dozens of members of Congress who had violated existing law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012. And what happened? Well, when they did it, basically nothing happened. A few of them got a $200 late filing fee fine for, in some cases, being years late and reporting what they had to report to the public about the stocks and the equities and the cryptocurrency that they were buying and selling, often day trading. They’re not getting punished for things that they themselves have passed into law to defend against conflicts of interest, to defend against insider trading, to defend against the idea that Congress is there to benefit itself and not the people it represents. Then that could be quite a betrayal of public trust.
So journalism of that sort has shone an incredibly white hot light on issues and the rot of existing laws and the lack of enforcement. But it’s hardly just in Congress. ProPublica, for example, has done incredible work around the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times have done award-winning work, including Pulitzer award-winning work, on this very topic and other aspects of government. So when you add this all up together, you see now with Donald Trump, basically unifying the power of the presidency with his business empire, both through himself and through the people around him. The rules of old no longer really apply. Any of the guardrails that were put in place for, “Oh, well, if you’re the president of the United States, you’re going to have to divest of anything that you have on the books. That could be a conflict.” Well, Donald Trump has just decided that that doesn’t apply to him, and who’s going to stop them?
So I think the question of 2025 very much is: who is going to stop fill-in-the-blank. That could be Donald Trump. That could be Elon Musk. That could be Democrats who are buying and selling defense contractor stocks while sitting on a House and Senate Armed Services Committee or have a great sway over the crypto world, or are totally vested in crypto now. The list goes on and on. For the public, it raises a question: Is this the way that we really want our government to work? Is there a better way?
Already, there are some members in Congress, including bizarro coalitions of Democrats and Republicans on the far, far right and the far, far left. Like Josh Hawley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being on the same page about stuff like this and saying, “No, we should expect more from ourselves. We should ensure that these conflicts of interest, or even the specter of conflicts or insider trading, are banished from Capitol Hill.”
Bills have been introduced, whether they will have success or not this session remains to be seen. But, one indication that there is at least some appetite to go forward with a bill that would provide an enhanced and strengthened enforcement is the fact that a Senate committee actually did pass a bill out of committee. It never went to the floor for a vote, but that was a bigger step than had ever been taken before on stock-related matters of this sort. So there is momentum. As we know from Congress, it may sometimes take 3, 4, 5, 6 congressional sessions for them to actually get the requisite support to go forward and pass a bill of any sort.
Yeah, it’s a fascinating, thorny question that really gets some strange bedfellows going. Before we finish up, I just wanted to talk a little bit about your Substack. You have launched a way to follow all your work. You’ve got a lot going on these days, but I've just been really, really enjoying it lately. I’d love to just throw it to you to talk a little bit about what inspired you to get that going. Then where, would you say, can people find you if they were to end up subscribing?
Yeah, well, after I left Raw Stories as editor-in-chief late last year, I decided I wanted to go and write. So I’m writing articles for a number of publications on topics that I deeply, passionately care about. Recently I had a very fun story that I wrote for Fortune Magazine. It was a cover story about Republicans steering clear of investing in Trump media, Tesla, Musk and Trump-related companies.
I’ve been having a blast doing some investigations for NOTUS, which is an upstart nonprofit news organization. I had a big FOIA story about the freak out at the U.S. Geological Survey, which I hope folks will read. It’s about Donald Trump doing what he did back in January and saying, “I’m going to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.” I got internal documents that told quite a tale about how the agency that names places, geographic and geological locations throughout the United States reacted to that. In essence, not to spoil the story, but they created a media blackout around it. It was quite fascinating. But as part of that, I’m working for the Ankler and OpenSecrets, writing stories for them. Business Insider, I had a piece on Harvard's lobbying, a real inside look at how Harvard is trying to defend against Donald Trump.
In the midst of all that, I had a lot of fun on Substack, too. On one hand, I was a little reluctant to do it, because it just seemed like the trendy thing that journalists are doing. But I spent some time reading authors and writers and thinkers whom I deeply respect, and seeing the work that they’re doing on it, and of course, having been a long-time Numlock reader. It seems that not everything I think up or everything that I want to write is necessarily going to have a nice tidy home in some other publication out there. So this has given me a vehicle to explore that area, to write some things that are not about money in politics, that might deal with history, that might deal with the law, that might deal with geography, that might deal with the media.
It’s been incredible to see the response to it from some people who I didn’t even know were paying attention, but have told me that they are. So that’s been heartening. It’s been quite an outlet alongside these others — some video and podcasting that I’ve been doing, including with CenterClip, which is an upstart, mini-podcasting organization, which has been a lot of fun, too.
Excellent. Yeah, no, it’s been really, really great to see. I mean, your beat is exactly my kind of stuff. It’s exactly the political stuff I like to read. It is just so cool to see you have your own singles. It’s great, man. I’m really excited to see it. I hope people check it out.
People can feel free to nerd out with me all they want. I’d like to be very accessible. If they have any questions about anything that I am up to, I will be delighted to talk to them about that for as long as we both can stand it.
Terrific. All right. So tell folks where they can find you. Where can they read your work?.
Sure. Substack at Dave Levinthal.
You can definitely go to my website at davelevinthal.com, where I am updating frequently.
Awesome. Thanks for coming on.
My pleasure.
Edited by Crystal Wang
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All of this because of the Citizens United decision.