The county’s per capita personal income in 2022 is just over $61,000, and just under 700 people live in the county (including 4 in 10 residents under 18 or over retirement age), meaning Banner County has a lot of money to give to a political action committee supporting a presidential candidate (likely Donald Trump, who won by 78 points in 2020): $42.2 million.
An act of astonishing generosity for an entire county to donate its entire per capita income to a presidential candidate is, of course, unusual, and will see billionaire Timothy Mellon donate 56 cents of every dollar he donated to Donald Trump’s super PAC this term.
Some people in America are so wealthy that it’s hard to communicate their wealth in a meaningful way. Our brains evolved to be able to understand things that can be counted in tens and hundreds; it’s nearly impossible to conceptualize the difference between a million and a billion.
It’s hard to even begin to convey the magnitude of the $75 million in political contributions listed in Mellon’s budget. Let me try this: If there were 75 million pennies, they would weigh as much as a blue whale. If you had $75 million, in If converted into a dime, that amount would weigh more than 60 percent of all the trash generated in New York City in one day.
Or, let’s apply this to the whole of the United States: If you were to do what our hypothetical Banner County did, that is, add up the annual income per resident, there are 48 counties that still wouldn’t come close to Mellon County’s $75 million.
Cumulatively, they voted for Trump by a 60-point margin in 2020. Just four voted for Joe Biden, three of whom are mostly non-white.
Of course, President Biden has his big donors: In the most recent reporting period, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is said to have donated $20 million to a political action committee supporting the incumbent president. There are five counties in the United States that could not match that total, even if every resident donated their entire annual salary.
Maybe this is a bit too abstract. Well, okay. What if you just wanted to save up your annual income and donate it to candidates? I created the following tool to help you see how many years’ worth of income you’d need to save, spending nothing else, to match the generosity of Mellon or Bloomberg.
The average resident of Banner County only needed to save a little over 1,000 years’ income. If they had started saving in 795, during the reign of Charlemagne, they would have been ready to save an amount equivalent to Mellon’s endowment by now.
This is a very large amount of money, and in fact, very beneficial to the presidential campaign itself. It is not easy to donate a large amount of money to one of the most expensive political activities in the world and dramatically change the campaign’s ability to run. But Mellon-level donations make it happen. For example, the 2016 presidential campaign spent about $761 million on television advertising. This included: every Mellon voted for Trump in both the general election and the primary, and donated one-tenth of his total to MAGA Inc., a PAC allied with Trump.
For another perspective, by the end of May, with just over five months until Election Day, the Trump campaign reported spending $83 million on literally everything. If Mellon had donated to the campaign (which he didn’t and couldn’t do because of contribution limits), he could have offset 90% of that spending. Sure, he probably would have spent more, but that’s exactly what MAGA Inc. is trying to do.
The prevailing idea behind the super-rich being able to donate freely to political campaigns is that their money gives them political speech, and therefore their spending is protected by the First Amendment. Well, that’s fine. But the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the middle class continues to widen. (In 1963, the wealthiest 99th percentile had 35 times the wealth of the wealthiest 50th percentile. By 2022, it’s 70 times that amount.) That means the wealthy can make their voice heard much more easily, powerfully, and freely than the poor.
So are the people of Banner County. They’re not poor by national standards. But by the Mellon/Bloomberg standards, they are very poor.
I’m generalizing, of course. Perhaps some of them could accumulate income over the last 1,200 years and surpass the generosity of Timothy Mellon.
