Three decades ago, things looked rather different. The Democratic Party that emerged from the 1980s was bruised and battered by the business coalition Ronald Reagan had built to undergird his presidency and that of his successor, George H. W. Bush. The Democrats were left fighting for scraps of business support here and there. One group that emerged as a reliable source of funds was trial lawyers. Democrats tended to support laws that made it easier to sue big companies, and they also tended to appoint judges who gave such lawsuits a sympathetic ear. In return, trial lawyers donated generously to the Democrats. In his 1992 campaign, Bush accused Bill Clinton of “being backed by practically every trial lawyer who ever wore a tasseled loafer.” He wasn’t wrong. By the mid-1990s, trial lawyers had eclipsed unions as a source of funds for Democratic candidates.

But the evolution of the economy would soon threaten this happy marriage. The rise of Silicon Valley presented an attractive new constituency for Democrats. Leading figures in California tech, like Hewlett-Packard’s David Packard and the venture capitalist John Doerr, had supported moderate Republicans in the 1970s and ’80s. As moderate Republicans entered the endangered species list and “Atari Democrats” across the country trumpeted their support for the high-tech industry, Democrats saw an opportunity. The only thing standing in the way was the trial lawyers.

The rise of class action lawsuits, particularly those on behalf of shareholders against corporate management, had made a lot of lawyers extremely rich. Corporations, in turn, had begun pushing for legislation to restrict these suits. The king of class actions in California was Bill Lerach (or, as he was called in the pages of Wired magazine, “Bloodsucking Scumbag”). Lerach also happened to be the second-largest donor to federal candidates in the country, almost always to Democrats. In 1996, he bankrolled a referendum in California to protect shareholder lawsuits. Silicon Valley reacted furiously, founding its first PAC, the California Technology Alliance, to oppose it. Tech-friendly Democratic operatives saw an opportunity and advised Clinton to come out against the referendum, which he did, betraying his trial lawyer allies (though they would forgive him). A new alliance, between Democrats and Silicon Valley, began to take form.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, tech companies were not yet the titans they would become. At the turn of the century, General Motors was still on top of the Fortune 500, with Apple coming in at number 285 and Amazon not even making the list. Among the corporate titans, the Republicans were still the preferred party, and George W. Bush, promising a revival of the Reagan bonanza, had mobilized them into a fundraising army. In the last two years of Clinton’s term, business was content to sit back and wait for Bush to come to power. They knew their needs would be addressed soon enough.

In 2004, the Democrats devised a strategy for confronting the forces arrayed against them. Two years earlier, they had managed to pass campaign finance reform to restrict soft money — the previously unlimited funds donors were able to give to state and local party organizations for general electioneering activities. All this money needed somewhere to go, and a DNC task force found a home for it in “527 groups.” These organizations, named after the relevant section of the tax code, were allowed to solicit and spend unlimited funds so long as they did not explicitly advocate the election or defeat of a specific party. A group could run ads about how a candidate had a terrible record on abortion rights and, so long as the ads did not directly call for that candidate’s defeat, spend as much as it wanted.

Democratic operatives, led by former White House staffer Harold M. Ickes, devised a strategy whereby Democrats could counter the Republican money advantage by soliciting truly staggering donations from a few very committed, very wealthy backers, who could route this money through 527 groups and thereby evade campaign finance limits. What Democrats lacked in breadth of support they would make up for in depth.

Chief among the Democrats’ supporters was the investor George Soros, who would plow over $20 million into 527 groups in 2004. All told, Democrats outperformed Republicans in 527 group fundraising $321 to $84 million, a four to one advantage. It wasn’t enough to unseat a wartime president presiding over a booming economy, but it was a sign of things to come.

Things began to change for the Democrats with Barack Obama’s election in 2008. George W. Bush’s second term was a catastrophe, beginning with Hurricane Katrina and ending with the 2008 financial collapse. The corporate leadership class knew the GOP was on its way out and made some efforts to become friendlier with the Democrats. Even more significant than this, however, was the small-dollar fundraising machine Obama built. Drawing on techniques developed by the Howard Dean campaign four years earlier, Obama’s campaign used the internet to solicit small donations from a large number of donors rather than taking large donations from a small number. This strategy proved lucrative, allowing Obama to raise so much money that he became the first candidate in the modern era to opt out of the public matching funds system, which provides public funding for campaigns at the cost of spending limits. Obama’s small-dollar fundraising allowed him to blow by those limits and easily outspend John McCain.

Obama’s presidency was a turning point in campaign finance in two respects. First, the legal foundation of campaign finance was transformed by the Citizens United and SpeechNow.org Supreme Court decisions, which together unleashed super PACs — groups that could solicit and spend unlimited money so long as they weren’t officially coordinating with campaigns themselves. Super PACs allowed ideologically inclined billionaires an even bigger role in the political system than 527 groups did, as they could run ads endorsing candidates and even undertake get-out-the-vote operations. At first super PAC spending was dominated by pro-Republican groups, though by the 2016 election Democrats had taken the lead.

The second change under Obama was the emergence of the tech sector as a major Democratic funder. Though tech had tilted Democratic since the ’90s, by Obama’s second term this fact was of much greater economic significance. Apple had climbed to seventeen on the Fortune 500, and both Amazon and Google had entered the top one hundred. The amount of money the sector could contribute had thus climbed to vertiginous heights.

At the same time, the relationship between Silicon Valley firms like Facebook and Google and the national security state was growing much tighter. Google had begun working closely with the NSA following Chinese hackers’ breach of the company’s security in 2009. Shortly thereafter, Google signed an agreement to share data with the agency for its rapidly expanding surveillance programs. Companies like AT&T enthusiastically participated in NSA surveillance, and — according to Edward Snowden, whose leaks revealed the extent of NSA spying — other companies, including Yahoo! and Facebook, were also in on the game. A significant part of the now mammoth tech industry built close links with the state. According to analysis by the political scientist Thomas Ferguson, this sector disproportionately funneled donations to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, even as the bulk of business still went for Mitt Romney.

The Democrats had come a long way since the ’90s. As he had in 2008, Obama decisively outspent his opponent in 2012. The GOP leadership recognized it was now playing catch-up, noting in its infamous “autopsy” of the 2012 election that “the RNC is just beginning to scratch the surface to compete with Democratic groups” in terms of fundraising. They began new plans to bolster fundraising for the 2016 race. The party’s voters, however, had other ideas.

Donald Trump entered the Republican primary in 2015 declaring that he didn’t need anybody’s money and he wasn’t controlled by donors. In response, American business was only too happy to direct its cash to Hillary Clinton instead. Clinton crushed Trump in fundraising, accumulating some $300 million more than him across both official candidate committees and outside expenditure groups. The situation was almost the exact reverse of 2004: Clinton commanded support from almost every sector of the economy, while Trump relied on a handful of highly ideological billionaires for much of his money. Though Trump managed to almost match Clinton in his number of small donors, he was never close in the money race.

Trump’s presidency accelerated a dynamic that had begun years earlier: the realignment of the rich. All the way back in 2007, the statistician Andrew Gelman pointed out that the real puzzle of American voting wasn’t that working-class people were voting Republican (which at the time tended to be overstated) but that, in blue states, rich as well as poor tended to vote Democratic. Since then, however, there has been a similar shift among the wealthy in red states as well, with upper-income voters everywhere becoming significantly more Democratic. Importantly, this shift is not confined to more liberal occupations like lawyers. A recent study of nearly ten thousand corporate directors and executives found clear evidence of a leftward shift in campaign contributions over the last two decades.

The result has been a massive Democratic fundraising advantage across a host of industries. One examination of employees at corporate law firms found a contribution ratio of nearly six to one in favor of Democrats. Another found that, among tech entrepreneurs who have made the Forbes 400 list, nearly 80 percent of donations were going to Democrats. With these kinds of numbers, it’s no surprise that Joe Biden repeated Clinton’s fundraising advantage in 2020, raising about $1.5 billion to Trump’s $1 billion. Once more, Trump can claim support from a small number of highly ideological billionaires, from Miriam Adelson to Elon Musk, but among the vast majority of corporate leaders, he has extraordinarily little support. Of the CEOs of the one hundred largest publicly traded corporations, only one — Musk — had donated to Trump by July 2024.

All of this allowed Kamala Harris to massively out-fundraise Trump in 2024 as well as to pursue wealthy donors with a new shamelessness. For example, Joe Biden used to charge donors $10,000 for a photo together. When Harris took over the ticket, she upped it to $50,000.

This isn’t the first moment in modern history that the Democratic Party has managed to unite almost all of big business behind it. Something similar happened in 1964, when the Republicans nominated the hyperconservative Barry Goldwater, who repelled big business with his extremism. Lyndon B. Johnson won at the polls with a coalition that included both the United Auto Workers and their employers. At the time, the socialist Bayard Rustin predicted that “it is unlikely that even [Johnson’s] political genius will be able to hold together a coalition so inherently unstable and rife with contradictions.”

Johnson’s coalition indeed splintered four years later, leading him to ultimately abandon his reelection campaign, just as Biden would some five decades later. Johnson was the candidate of staying the course in Vietnam. Today the Democrats are the party of the economic status quo. This has allowed them to consolidate massive support from the affluent as the GOP has dutifully gotten behind Donald Trump’s promises of radical upheaval in the tax code, trade policy, and much else besides.

While Johnson’s support from business in 1964 was part of an overwhelming electoral victory in which Goldwater received less than 40 percent of the vote, the Democrats’ contemporary Golden Horde has delivered nothing comparable. It’s true that the GOP has the ignominious distinction of rarely winning the popular vote. But even taking that into account, Democratic margins of victory in this period have been quite narrow and often insufficient to overcome various undemocratic features of the American polity. Donald Trump’s victory only confirms the precariousness of the party’s position. It has consolidated a grand coalition of the American elite but in doing so has lost more and more of its working-class base. Its long quest to win the hearts and minds of the rich has cost the party, and the country, dearly.