New ‘Oligarch Index’ Tracks California’s Biggest Political Spenders

When it burst into widespread use as a result of the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, the phrase “Follow the money” referred to political influence or corruption and how to track it.

Fifty years later, the meaning of the phrase hasn’t changed much — but following the money is now magnitudes more complex. With the proliferation of political action committees and the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court, corporations and wealthy individuals have more ways than ever to spread their political spending. That includes dark money, the practice of giving to nonprofits (which don’t have to disclose donors), which in turn move the money along to giant political fundraising organizations — Super PACs, as they’re known.

Those are a few of the reasons why a new project that tracks political spending in California is so fascinating. As the California Oligarch Index makes clear, a relatively tiny number of wealthy donors and corporations are exerting profound influence over who gets elected and which laws get passed in the Golden State.

That point may feel obvious this year, with the state’s billionaires making no attempt to disguise their spending in an effort to defeat a one-time tax on their wealth. In truth, though, the larger pattern of mega-money flowing through state politics has been ongoing for two decades — and it’s glaring.

According to the social justice-minded creators of the index, the top 99 individual and corporate political donors in California spent more on campaigns and lobbying from 2005 to 2024 than did the bottom 99.9% of the state’s residents, businesses and organizations combined. The total came to roughly $5.8 billion — and again, that’s not counting the hundreds of millions being spent by the rich to try to defeat Prop. 40, the so-called Billionaire Tax, this November.

When they aren’t contributing directly to campaigns, these companies and individuals are pushing money through lobbying organizations that will advance their mostly pro-wealth agendas for them, said Jim Freeman, a Colorado-based civil rights lawyer who founded the Social Movement Support Lab, which helps grassroots social and racial justice efforts across the country. Freeman and a team of researchers produced the California Oligarch Index.

“These companies and people tend not to be particularly transparent or forthright about their political activity,” Freeman said. “We don’t know enough about who they are, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.”

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The biggest spenders on the California political and lobbying scene certainly have their own agendas.

Chevron tops the California Oligarch Index with more than $260 million spent on campaigns and lobbying from 2005 to 2024, part of the company’s ongoing effort to fight oil and gas regulation and environmental safeguarding. After that comes DaVita ($256 million, mostly to defeat state measures intended to more closely regulate dialysis clinics); the California Association of Realtors ($254 million, much of it to oppose rent controls and many affordable housing laws); and Philip Morris/Altria ($237 million, mostly to oppose higher cigarette taxes and bans on flavored tobacco products).

While the term “oligarch” is usually applied to people, not corporations, the index’s authors explain why they do so here. “Major corporations are largely controlled by the ultra-wealthy,” they write, noting that just three Wall Street firms — Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street — are the major shareholders in 95% of S&P 500 corporations. The wealthiest 1% of Americans own 51% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

There were plenty of other massive corporate political spenders in California, including health care giant Kaiser Permanente, the Pacific Gas & Electric utility company, AT&T and Uber. All have special interests. But Freeman said one of the surprises arising from the research was that the mega-corporations apparently have shared political interests, too.

“It wasn’t just big pharma spending their money against efforts to reduce prescription drug prices, or big oil fighting climate change [mitigation] efforts,” Freeman said. “What we also found was all of these organizations investing heavily in a broader agenda that is deeply hostile to social justice efforts.”

That agenda, he said, is largely facilitated through the corporations’ funding and support of pro-business lobby groups like the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Business Roundtable. Those organizations, both of which appear among the index’s 99 largest spenders on the state’s political scene, routinely oppose efforts to increase worker wages, increase taxes or place regulations on businesses, which the groups argue would drive up prices or expose owners to costly litigation.

Individual donors also have left their mark. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Gap co-founder Doris Fisher and members of the Walton family (Walmart) have all spent heavily over the past two decades, much of it in support of measures that would expand charter schools in the state. Some other significant political contributors don’t show up in the index, including a number of labor unions and self-funding individuals like Tom Steyer, who spent more than $215 million on his unsuccessful primary campaign for governor this year.

And eight different law enforcement groups land among California’s 99 largest political spenders, money largely directed at expanding local and state correctional systems and increasing budgets. That includes an industry-leading $95.6 million spent by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the labor union representing state prison guards.

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Freeman’s group makes no secret of where it’s coming from. The Social Movement Support Lab’s founders believe that allowing the ultrawealthy to control elections via massive political funding subverts democratic processes and tilts policies to benefit the rich, stunting progress toward more equitable societies.

Still, the California Oligarch Index was designed to enlighten the public and the state’s policymakers, not to lead to any specific new legislation. No policy recommendations are included in either the index itself or the 16-page summary that accompanies it.

“People have at least a broad sense of the big money in politics, but that’s usually a very abstract feeling,” Freeman said. “We wanted to really connect that to the policies that affect people’s lives and the harms that they’ve experienced as a result of a lot of these policies.”

Working on civil rights issues across the U.S., Freeman has seen the same corporate and wealthy individual forces repeatedly aligned against local and state efforts to do things like raise wages, cap rents or regulate industries. In other words, California is no outlier. It’s simply the largest and therefore most newsworthy example of such heavy political spending to advance the agendas of the rich.

In a state of 39 million people, can 99 corporations and individuals really exert that much influence on politics and policy? As the index makes clear, that is already happening — and it has been for some while.

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