Affluence, Presidential Politics, and Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Money in Politics and Individual Campaign Contributors

Abstract

Past scholarship on democratic erosion emphasizes the importance of understanding when wealthy interests are likely to reject or support politicians who actively undermine democratic norms. We examine this question by assessing the level and timing of affluent support for Donald Trump relative to other candidates for the American presidency from 2008 to 2020. We combine federal campaign finance disclosures with nationwide property ownership records and commercial voter files to construct an twelve-year, individual-level panel of donation behavior, estimated affluence, and demographic attributes covering over 200 million Americans, and use this panel to describe contributions to presidential campaigns across the period. We show that all candidates rely heavily on the most affluent 0.1% of Americans for support, but that wealthy Republican donors were comparatively reluctant to support Donald Trump's campaign in 2016. However, once he won election, many wealthy donors returned, though still at levels below wealthy donor support for other presidential candidates. We find important changes both in the distribution of donor wealth as well as the composition of donors along the distribution; most notably, an influx of new affluent donors to the Republican party, as well as an increase in donor volume from the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution. Our paper establishes important descriptive baselines for presidential donation behavior in the American populace, particularly among the wealthiest Americans, while raising additional questions about the willingness of the affluent to affirm democratic norms in a political system characterized by both intense wealth inequality and heightened levels of ideological polarization. We also make a significant methodological contribution to this literature by merging nationwide administrative data to measure donor wealth, rather than relying on opaquely-constructed estimates from data vendors, survey self-reports, or tautologically-defined "small donors."

Authors

• Sean Kates, University of Pennsylvania

• Eric Manning, Princeton University

• Tali Mendelberg, Princeton University

• Omar Wasow, UC Berkeley