On election day, political leaders often tremble in fear of the people’s verdict. The vote of a billionaire has no more weight than that of a pauper. The recent midterm elections in the United States showed us that leaders who seem all powerful can still find themselves much diminished by the humble act of people exercising their hard won right to vote. But democracy means more than voting. In this blog, I consider how much of the political process has been captured by money, how this undermines democracy long before votes are cast, and what we can do about it.

Go back to the 2026 midterm U.S. elections. A record $11.87 billion was spent on political advertising, evenly split between the two main parties (AdImpact, 2026; Fountain, 2026). Where did this money come from? At least $2.7 billion was donated by those that The Washington Post describes as “the ultra-rich” (Ence Morse et al., 2026). $1.7 billion went to Republicans and $832 million to Democrats. This was 22.8% of the $11.87 billion total. Elon Musk donated $446 million. It was the largest amount ever contributed in an election by an individual who was not themselves running for office. $224 million of this was spent in Texas (Schleifer, 2026). It is true that Musk failed to get what he wanted. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem. Those with money have a much greater opportunity to influence the outcome than those without. Elections can resemble a boxing contest in which one of the fighters has stuffed his gloves with horseshoes, even if all his punches don’t land. And it’s not just Republicans. Reliance on donations from the mega-wealthy has also skewed Democratic politics to favor their interests.

Consider too the 2024 Presidential election. This was one of the most expensive ever. Democrats spent about $6.7 billion and Republicans $7.6 billion (Grabenstein, 2024). Donations from 300 billionaires and their immediate family members made up 19% of this total. They contributed a relatively paltry 0.3% of political spending in 2008. What changed? In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there should be no limits on political donations. The influence of billionaires on politics has skyrocketed ever since (Baker & Rich, 2026). In 2026, Donald Trump’s cabinet in the U.S. had roughly a dozen billionaires in its ranks (Chazan, 2026; Zhang, 2026). The word that best describes such a state of affairs is corruption. As the political scientist Jeffrey Winters notes, “Pretending that private wealth is somehow not raw political power is the grand lie that sustains domination through democracy” (Winters, 2026, p. 26). It all calls to mind the old saying that an honest politician is someone who, when they are bought, stays bought.

This is not a purely American problem. In August 2025 the little-known Christopher Harborne donated a massive £9 million to the Reform party in the UK, led by the populist leader Nigel Farage. In November of the same year, he gave a further £3 million. It also emerged that he had given Farage a personal gift of £5 million. Harborne made most of his money through cryptocurrency. For someone bankrolling a nationalist party, it is ironic that he spent the previous 25 years living in Thailand, where he goes under the name Chakrit Sakunkrit (Thomas, 2026). In late 2026 the crypto billionaire Ben Delo, convicted in the U.S. for failing to implement money laundering controls, donated a staggering £36 million to Reform, which Harborne promptly matched. They were the two largest donations to a political party in the country’s history (Mason, 2026). It is, of course, a coincidence that Farage has proposed that the UK should become a major hub for crypto currency, with capital gains tax on crypto reduced from 24% to 10%.

Some would like to strengthen the power of wealth in politics still further. One suggestion, endorsed by Tobias Lütke, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of Shopify, is that voting rights should be tied to how much tax people pay. Specifically, the proposal he endorsed argued that there should be “zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more.” This was pitched as fairness, since it would give more representation to those who pay the bills through taxation. As Fortune magazine’s analysis noted, those deprived of the franchise would include “all retirees living on Social Security and pension income, students, caregivers, disabled Americans, and millions of low-wage workers who owe no net federal income tax after deductions and credits” (Lichtenberg, 2026). That the right to vote was historically associated with owning property and wealth does little to enhance the attractiveness of such ideas today.