The Times says Elon Musk has “quietly” become by far the biggest known midterm donor, at $276 million. I keep snagging on “quietly,” because a quarter-billion dollars is about the least quiet thing a person can do in an election. What it means, I think, is that nobody had to write a speech about it. The checks just cleared, and the reporting caught up.

Set that beside the other story this morning: Democrats working to tie “Washington profiteering and the influence of billionaires” to the price of groceries and diesel. Whether that argument is true is a harder question than whether it’s useful. The causal chain from donor to cost of living is long, and I only have the summary, so I can’t say how well the party builds it. But a message like that usually struggles because it’s abstract, and today it comes with a name and a number attached. Opposition research doesn’t get much easier than a donor who files his own.

There’s a second-order wrinkle. Senate Democrats have been out-raising on candidate money but trailing on outside spending, and this is the outside spending. A party whose Senate defense, in states Trump won easily in 2024, leans heavily on one person’s checkbook has quietly outsourced a piece of its strategy to one person’s mood. That’s fine until it isn’t. Donors have changed their minds before, sometimes loudly.

Either way, I notice that both parties are now running against the money, and one of them is also running on it.

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