The top Democrat on the Federal Election Commission is lashing out at the profile of today’s top campaign donors: old, rich, white guys.
In a conference focused on ridding money from the political system, Ellen Weintraub, FEC vice chair, said the nation’s big Democratic and Republican donors are not representative of the overall voting population.
Speaking at an American Promise conference she said that donors plan to spend $750 million in the midterm elections, up from $550 million in 2014. And, she said, the top 1 percent of donors, or some 541, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, have already funded 93 percent of 2018 donations.
“Who are these guys,” she asked in a YouTube video of the late June event just recently posted.
“It may not surprise you to learn that they are overwhelmingly white, old, rich, and male. So they’re not really a very representative group if you look at the population as a whole,” she added.
She didn’t pull punches in giving examples, citing the top donor as Democrat Tom Steyer followed by Republican Richard Uihlein and Democrat-aligned independent Michael Bloomberg.
Weintraub also revealed that the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision opening up donations from corporations hasn’t resulted in the wave of money into the political system as Democrats feared.
“The good news is that business corporations are not actually swamping our politics with money,” she said.
