With ‘Stealth Politics,’ Billionaires Make Sure Their Money Talks – The New York Times

Billionaires are neither good nor bad for the country — at least that’s what more than half of Americans think, according to a poll published by the Pew Research Center last year. Maybe this is because they don’t know how billionaires affect their lives or what political power they wield; maybe it’s just because a billion is such an unfathomably large number. A decade or so ago, three political scientists at Northwestern University, Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright and Matthew Lacombe, set out to determine the impact that superrich Americans have on congressional and presidential policies. They weren’t starting from scratch; previous work done by another political scientist, Martin Gilens, used years of surveys of thousands of poor, middle-income and affluent Americans to show that policymakers responded almost exclusively to the preferences of that last group. Following this earlier research, Page told me recently, “I wanted to find out how much influence the truly wealthy have and what they want from government.” Page and his colleagues wanted to do a quantitative analysis of political inequality. First, however, they had to figure out where to get the data.

Teaming up with a colleague at Vanderbilt University, Larry Bartels, Page and Seawright started by surveying wealthy people in the Chicago area — interviewing a random sample of 83 individuals from households with a median worth of $7.5 million. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that these multimillionaires skewed very conservative on economic issues, expressing a preference for marketplaces and philanthropy, rather than governments, to solve public problems; some also supported reductions to Social Security and Medicare. (At the same time, earlier research showed, affluent Americans tended to take socially liberal stances, supporting abortion and gay rights.) The resulting study, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” felt small to Page, its data insufficient and limited by geography. But he thought he could use it as proof of concept to generate interest for a first-of-its-kind national data set.

“I spent most of two years running around the country — you know, Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur, Rockefeller, sort of all of the foundations I could get in the door — and nobody wanted to fund it,” Page says. There were two reasons, he thinks: “The obvious one was it was going to take five or six million dollars to do it. And that’s a lot of cash. I think in the background, a lot of boards of corporations, which have wealthy people on them, were not all that enthusiastic about studying the politics of wealthy people.”

“Maybe we’ll never be able to do this national study,” Page told Seawright at the time.

“These multimillionaires only have $10 million typically,” Seawright said. “Why not study the really wealthy people like billionaires?”

“How do we do that?” Page asked.

They couldn’t just talk to billionaires. The ultrarich generally don’t respond to surveys, nor are they particularly interested in being studied by academics. Their gatekeepers have gatekeepers, Page is fond of saying. So Seawright suggested a workaround: On Google and the LexisNexis database, they could search for various keywords on economic and social issues. It would then be possible to find and connect billionaires’ words and actions. This was a cheaper approach that allowed for a narrow focus on the extremely wealthy and the role they play in American democracy.

The authors chose to look at the decade between 2003 and 2013 and limit their searches to the 100 wealthiest billionaires in 2013, as determined by Forbes magazine. Their subjects — individuals with a net worth of at least $4.6 billion — included familiar figures like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, the Koch brothers, the Waltons, Mark Zuckerberg, Phil Knight, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page. And against these names Lacombe cross-searched 34 key words or phrases like “tax burden,” “tax revenue expansion,” “tax revenue enhancement,” “Social Security retirement pension,” “estate tax,” “corporate tax rates” and “flat tax.”

The work was tedious. After two months and hundreds of hours of mind-numbing work, Lacombe had little to show for his labor. He gave Seawright the bad news in April 2014: Only a few billionaires showed up linked to any of the search terms — or even to any public records or groups connected to the search terms. The information they were looking for simply didn’t exist. Lacombe assumed that when Page found out, it might mean the end of the project.

But Page was intrigued. “It was only later that I realized, first of all, what that finding was and what it signified,” he says. “In social science, people hate nonfindings. I’d been hoping that we figured out a clever way that we could tell what billionaires did for all these different issues, and it was disappointing not to.” But this nonfinding was different; perhaps the ultrarich didn’t talk about economic theory because they were practicing “stealth politics,” or actively working behind the scenes to shape government policies. This could be a serious finding, they realized. “If they’re being very influential, but it’s in a stealthy way without talking about public policy,” Page says, “that’s a special problem for American politics.”

The main reason Billionaires practice stealth politics, Page says, is that taken collectively, their political preferences do not align with what a majority of Americans want. Their near total silence on issues like taxes and Social Security is “almost certainly deliberate — probably caused mainly by a desire to avoid offense concerning their unpopular political opinions.” This makes it easier for them to avoid being held accountable.

Page was surprised by the difference between perception and reality when it came to billionaires and their politics. A few characters with public personas and relatively centrist or even left-of-center reputations — figures like Mike Bloomberg, George Soros and Warren Buffett — tended to define how the public felt about the cohort as a whole. “But it turns out when you look at all the wealthiest billionaires, the picture is very different, much more economically conservative,” Page says.

Forty percent of all political donations come from the top 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Though the billionaires barely showed up in the public record talking about taxes, for example, it was still possible to connect their sizable contributions to ideological political action committees and to candidates who supported issues like tax cuts for the wealthy, privatizing Social Security, reduced social spending and abolishing the estate tax. “What we see basically is a class of people who have more money than God, who are very politically active in relatively unknown ways and who we have reasons to believe have been politically influential and have used their political influence in ways that don’t really serve the interests or preferences of what most Americans want,” Lacombe says. And yet Americans whose interests are not being served by those wealthy contributors are being swayed by politicians working toward the billionaires’ ends.

“They’re mobilizing them on the basis of cultural grievances,” Lacombe says. “And I think those two things in conjunction are fairly large contributors to the dysfunction that we’ve observed in American politics.”

Page, Seawright and Lacombe presented their first findings at the 2014 Midwest Political Science Association conference. Studies had already established that wealth influenced policy, but as Bartels wrote that year, the broader question of how wealth shapes policy had been largely ignored. “For decades, most political scientists have sidestepped that question, because it has not seemed amenable to rigorous (meaning quantitative) scientific investigation,” he wrote in The Washington Post in April 2014. “But now, political scientists are belatedly turning more systematic attention to the political impact of wealth, and their findings should reshape how we think about American democracy.”

After that first presentation, Lacombe, Seawright and Page expanded their paper into what would eventually become their book, “Billionaires and Stealth Politics.” Published in 2018 by the University of Chicago Press, the book added a focus on social issues, as well as a qualitative analysis of four individual billionaires. The results echoed earlier findings: The few billionaires who spoke publicly about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion were relatively liberal — and they felt more free to express these opinions because they mirrored majority American opinion. Immigration was an exception: Many billionaires favored cheap labor and the freedom to import what they considered to be high-skilled workers. Because this ran counter to how many Americans felt about immigration, they remained silent on that issue.

Much of the “stealth politics” practiced by America’s ultrarich is happening at the state and local levels, where many crucial pocketbook issues are decided, often outside the scrutiny of the national media. In some states, that has meant a reduction in the pensions and collective bargaining rights of public-sector workers and the rejection of Medicaid extensions. “My expectations going into this would have been that billionaires were powerful, and that billionaires mostly work on behalf of causes that many Americans don’t support,” Lacombe says. “But I was surprised by the extent of their stealthiness.”

The four billionaires who served as case studies — Warren Buffett, John Menard Jr., Carl Icahn and David Koch — were selected to capture a range of political philosophies. The authors found that Buffett, for example, a moderately liberal or center-left billionaire and the most politically vocal of the four, had said “friendly things about estate taxes,” as Page puts it, but then provided no financial or other support for the cause. “Among the billionaires that we studied, the 100 wealthiest, none of them are actually working to make taxes more progressive” — and some even worked silently against the estate tax. Yet liberal billionaires have the same outsize access to politicians as their conservative peers do; they could push their own agendas. “A lot of really wealthy Americans probably can pick up the phone and talk to somebody on a high-level position in Washington pretty much anytime,” Page says.

David Koch invested heavily in conservative causes for decades before his death in 2019. He and his brother Charles recognized the importance of exercising influence in state legislatures and city councils. “That’s where voting rules are established,” Lacombe says. “That’s where congressional districts are drawn. So, a lot of the sort of rules of the game are established on those levels.” Menard, who made his fortune by founding the Menards chain of home-improvement stores, was randomly selected from the 70 or so billionaires who never made public comments about taxes or economic issues during the period under study. The researchers found that he flexed his political power by encouraging employees to take part in training exercises whose focuses included conservative positions on things like government debt and wages. (Menards banned merit-pay increases to employees involved in unionization efforts; at one point, store managers were required to sign a contract that included a clause cutting their salary by 60 percent if their branch of the store ever unionized.) Menard also donated substantially to the Koch brothers’ political causes.

Icahn, an activist investor, deviated the sharpest from the pattern found in the book. He said very little about policy, and he was also fairly inactive in politics. Then, in 2015, he endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, and he later established a $150 million super PAC dedicated to corporate tax reform.

When “Billionaires and Stealth Politics” came out in 2018, Page says, multimillionaires who made political contributions gave on average around $4,500 annually; for billionaires, the amount was $500,000. And, he emphasizes, that was just reported contributions, which means it didn’t include any so-called dark money, the political giving by undisclosed donors that was blessed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United. Page adds that 21 percent of the multimillionaires in their study bundled political donations from other people. “Twenty-one percent is a lot,” he says. “But then, among the billionaires, it was 36 percent.” Among Americans overall, roughly 18 percent make political donations, usually in amounts between $25 and $100. Forty percent of all political donations come from the top 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, was elected president shortly before the book was finished, so it had to acknowledge his rise to power. “When millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump, many believed his claims of personal wealth would free him from wealthy donors and allow him to drain the swamp,” Lacombe says. “But then Trump appointed several billionaires” — including Icahn — “to high-level positions and pursued billionaire-friendly policies, such as cutting corporate income tax.” He thinks that whether or not Trump is an actual billionaire is less relevant than what he campaigned on. “The sort of populist discontent that contributed to Trump’s election spoke to what we found in interesting and even frustrating ways, in that our findings might lead you to believe that a populist could do well in elections, but there was a certain irony to that populist being a billionaire,” Lacombe says. “It’s a tragic irony. It suggested to me that our general belief that most Americans misunderstand and misperceive what billionaires say and do about politics was right.”

In 2009, Page wrote a paper with Jeffrey Winters titled “Oligarchy in the United States?” The question mark was Page’s, to allow for the possibility that democracy was still the defining feature of the American political system. To say the country was ruled by a few seemed excessive. Today — in a moment when the Russian invasion of Ukraine has turned the spotlight on Russian oligarchs — he says: “The evidence has piled up in such a way that it’s maybe not unreasonable to call some of America’s wealthiest people oligarchs. I think that’s the way I’d put it.” He pauses. “Lots of evidence.”

What makes American oligarchy different from its Russian counterpart is that it operates at significantly greater arm’s length, driven by lobbying and campaign contributions rather than outright corruption. “Russian oligarchs who are close to Putin — that’s a very special kind of thing,” Page says. “They make a ton of money in pretty direct relation to the government. A lot of them make it from government-owned or -controlled or -regulated companies. That’s substantially less true of the United States.” Page acknowledges that American oligarchy is different — it is embedded in the political system.

When Lacombe, Seawright and Page started collecting data in 2013, the total net worth of the top 400 billionaires was an estimated $2.2 trillion. Less than a decade later, the number has more than doubled to $4.5 trillion. “There are more billionaires over time, and they are richer,” says Lacombe, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College. “And not only are they richer, but the gap between them and everybody else is greater.”

What sort of politics can money buy? It’s hard to know exactly, but favorable tax policies remain the most revealing. Page also points to internet regulation. “It seems like almost everybody who’s been paying attention worries quite a bit about the result of basically unregulated social media,” he says. “But as far as I can tell, there is not a very strong move to do anything about it.” Many politicians are “dependent on some of the people they would have to regulate. So, I don’t see it happening. And that’s probably a result of the political power of wealthy people.”

Page still dreams of conducting a data-driven national survey of the very rich. “If billionaires suddenly started favoring the same things that most Americans favor in politics, then they’d probably be happier to talk about it,” he says. But he doesn’t think that will happen anytime soon.

Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of “Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Frontlines of California’s Wildfires.”