How Elon Musk and Big Tech Poured Millions Into the Midterms, and Lost

Hugo Lowell: Hey, everyone.

Leah Feiger: David Gilbert, senior reporter who focuses on disinformation and extremism.

David Gilbert: Hello. Good to be here.

Leah Feiger: And senior writer Vittoria Elliott, who focuses on the internal machinations of the US government.

Vittoria Elliott: Good to be here, Leah.

Leah Feiger: We'll get into how these candidates supported by Elon Musk and AI super PACs ended up faring and why these elections were rebuked by Americans of not just the current government, but also of Big Tech. So the Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the Senate and three in the House. They blew by both. What were your biggest shocks of the evening, everyone?

David Gilbert: Well, because I am based in Ireland, I woke up on Wednesday morning and the landscape had just completely changed. Even people who were in deep red states like Arizona, like Mark Lamb, who was a certainty to win, his race still hasn't been drawn. It's just exceptional.

Vittoria Elliott: I was floored by how tight Mississippi is and the win in South Carolina. I would not have put my money on that. Incredible.

Hugo Lowell: Yeah, I agree with Tori. South Carolina, Darline Graham was handpicked by Trump and endorsed by him to win that race. And it was not this close in previous cycles.

Leah Feiger: To inherit her brother's seat.

Hugo Lowell: Insane. And she ended up losing it. And then also in Mississippi, the fact that Cindy Hyde-Smith, who's been in the Senate a long time, was once considered to be a very, very safe incumbent losing in deep red Mississippi. I mean, it's not been called yet, but that was also a massive shock. And I think what really stood out to me was having been at Trump's election night party in 2024 for that presidential run and how everyone there was talking about how Trump had put together this historic coalition, was making big gains in all sorts of places where they didn't expect to and took all of the battleground states. What happened on Tuesday night, on election night was a reversal of all of those gains and then some. I mean, if you think about Trump winning double digits in battleground states and then seeing what happened on Tuesday, those states swung 10 points back in the other direction for Democrats. And it just, I think, goes to show how in 18 months and 20 months, Trump has managed to undo everything and all of the goodwill that Republicans have built up in the '24 election cycle through all of his vanity projects, all of the cuts with DOGE, all of his acts in the federal government, and really the fact that he led the country into an unpopular war that led to higher prices, which are even more unpopular.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. I mean, I was messaging with Democrats on Tuesday night who were telling me that they really couldn't have, in their wildest dreams, though that this was going to happen. It wasn't like just picking up Maine or just picking up South Carolina. It was Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, Michigan. And obviously for Republicans, the blame game has started. This was an unpopular president leading an unpopular war with a variety of, as you mentioned, policies that really hit home for a lot of Americans and residents. So Trump, after the election, blamed the quality of the candidates and the fact that he wasn't on the ballot. The MAGA base didn't totally agree. David, you reported out a story about how MAGA basically went feral, I think is the fair way to put it on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning looking at all of the results come in. What did you see?

David Gilbert: Yeah, it was interesting to look at how it played out because Trump also blamed Fox News, let's not forget, because he said they had a lot to bear because they platformed a lot of Democrats because that's what they do. But I think the first reaction was kind of silenced because a lot of people just could not believe it. If you looked at what Steve Bannon show and they kept bringing up new results in Texas in particular, he just kind of couldn't believe that what he was seeing was actually happening. So I think initially they were just shocked like pretty much everyone else that this was actually happening to the extent that it was happening. But slowly then they began to say, "OK, well, this is because of the war and the war that Trump more particularly got us into." So figures like Matt Walsh, who has been critical of the war for quite a while now, was kind of laying it all out saying, "This is exactly why we've had such a reversal from 2024."

Leah Feiger: I mean, Walsh, who's an infamous right-wing podcaster, quite literally called Trump, "An 80-year-old lame duck president," and called the results, "A political catastrophe of historic proportions." It doesn't get more official than that. And this for me was the first time that I saw this blame game laid out so concisely, so specifically, and so squarely on Trump's shoulders.

David Gilbert: Yeah, I think they realized very quickly that they couldn't look anywhere else except at Trump because the pushback or the reaction was so strong that there really wasn't anywhere else to look.

Leah Feiger: Yeah, I want to get into that. Specifically, Hugo had a newsletter that came out on Wednesday afternoon all about the blaming process inside the White House and inside the Trump administration where staffers have been essentially trying to assign blame without exactly pinpointing the president. Let's talk scapegoats. Who's getting thrown under the bus this time?

Hugo Lowell: Yeah, I still think it's early, but it is very quick how people coalesced behind blaming Pete Hegseth, for one, the Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of War because of his encouragement of Trump for months and months about continuing the Iran war. He has been a big cheerleader for continuing to have kinetic strikes, for continuing to extend deployments in the Middle East, and being pretty unapologetic about championing the conflict essentially.

Leah Feiger: You had one piece of reporting in there that was absolutely mind-blowing to me, honestly, that Hegseth's reports from the Iran war to the president were so rosy, so glowing that Vice President JD Vance and Marco Rubio from State, they ended up having to ask people for their own intelligence briefings because they were very aware they were not getting an accurate assessment of the war on the ground. That's pretty unbelievable.

Hugo Lowell: Yeah, I mean look, Rubio and JD Vance have both been very voracious consumers of intelligence products. That was the case even before the Iran war, but our sources tell us that interest in getting an unvarnished somber look at the situation in Iran became a top priority for those guys because at the end of the day, they have their own political ambitions, but they also have to advise the president themselves. And so they felt like they needed to arm themselves with the facts of the matter in order to guide the president in the best way. And this all coalesces, right? It's like the fact that the Iran war was being presented to Trump in such a rosy way meant he felt more emboldened to continue it. People inside the administration thought, "Well, this is actually not the situation." And had Trump been maybe, I want to say misled, but had he received a different characterization, maybe he would've been less interested in continuing the conflict, especially months before the midterms.

Leah Feiger: It's amazing. There's really no other word for it. So let's talk about spending. If we're going to talk about spending, we have to talk about Elon Musk. He spent over $400 million in this midterm cycle, largely attacking Democrats and supporting Republican candidates. He virtually set his money on fire. According to a WIRED analysis, by Wednesday morning, candidates backed by Musk's America PAC had lost 20 races and won only 1. There are still several that haven't been called yet, but to put another way with where we're at right now with the information we have, of every traceable dollar that Musk put into a race that has now been decided, more than 99 cents went to a race that he lost. Just unbelievable figures there.

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think it's pretty incredible that two years ago, America PAC was this new force in Republican politics. Everyone was starting to play to the sort of America PAC donation situation, and it pulled in not just money from Musk, it pulled in money from big VCs like Shaun Maguire. And in 2024, as we reported, their ground game wasn't exactly super strong, but it was just the willingness to pump money in. Similar to how VCs make things work, you pump money in until your team wins. And just to watch that strategy really crash and burn, but I think we saw some early indications that, particularly in the months post DOGE, that Elon himself became a really toxic thing for Republicans to start attaching themselves to.

Leah Feiger: Oh, absolutely.

Vittoria Elliott: And so then it became this sort of monkey's paw situation where it's like you can take the America PAC money and then you get tarred with the Musk brand. And those two things, maybe at best they cancel each other out, but it seems like actually the Musk brand is more toxic than he and his candidates could buy their way out of.

Leah Feiger: I 100 percent agree with you. Hugo, you were very involved in the WIRED tracking project where we built a live tracker of Musk's political spending. Can you take us through a couple of the candidates that he put all of this dough behind and how they ended up doing?

Hugo Lowell: Yeah, look, in total, Musk's America PAC spent about close to $500 million actually, half a billion dollars this midterm cycle, him alone. I mean, if you conceptualize that sort of spending, the way to think about it I think is he effectively ran a shadow Republican national committee. That is the scale of that contribution. And were it not for that money, by the way, some of these losses might've been even greater. Tori talked about the ground game that America PAC financed, that has been a big focus both in '24 and also in this cycle. Obviously his biggest focus was Texas. That is his home base. That was where he spent the most amount of time, the most amount of money and the most amount of resources, and it basically got him nothing. I mean, Ken Paxton lost by such a wide margin that hanging onto James Talarico's coattails was Gina Hinojosa in the governor's race. So I think the way to look at Musk's spending, if you talk to Republican operatives and people in Trump world, is to think about it in terms of what is this money actually buying him? For him, it's a rounding era. Half billion dollars to Elon, it's kind of pocket change, which is kind of incredible to think about, but that is the case. And so what is the net effect he gets from this? And it is probably the fact that he can play kingmaker now running into 2028. And if he decides to back a particular presidential candidate, I'm sorry to say this, we already just finished this election, but '28 is around the corner. If he decides to back a particular candidate, no one else is really going to be able to compete with him on the money front because if he sinks another half billion, if not more, in the next cycle, who else has that kind of money to play with? It's insane.

Leah Feiger: But I think the takeaway, at least in this moment, is that money didn't matter. He couldn't buy these races. People were so mad at Republicans and so mad at Trump's mandate that this didn't actually work out for him. I'm not sure, going into 2028, I would necessarily want Elon Musk behind me.

Hugo Lowell: I don't know that voters necessarily see that though, right? I mean, are voters really tracking which ad was paid for by which super PAC? I understand that the money didn't buy a Texas Senate race. By the way, as it shouldn't, this concept that you can just buy Senate races. And I take your point and I see what you're saying, but it is not clear to me that whether the money would've come from the Senate leadership fund, which is the super PAC aligned with the Senate Republican leadership, or whether it came from America PAC, in some ways doesn't matter. It's like the volume of cash that flowed in, where is that going to be going and what does the future of those kinds of contributions look like? And I do think it kind of flows into '28.

Vittoria Elliott: I would just argue that yeah, maybe if he wrapped the money on many, many layers of PACs that made it hard to trace where it came from, I would agree with you. But anyone who gets money that flows from Elon or even his association with the party allows for someone to run an attack ad that says, "Elon backs this guy. Elon backs this party," they're going to execute on the unpopular will of an unelected billionaire, I think is still going to be toxic even if the money eventually gets routed through the general Republican funding apparatus.

Leah Feiger: I think the though that this is in some ways all a preview for '28 is the right take. Sort of in that vein is where the AI industry showed up in this election cycle as well. Leading the future, which is the pro-AI network backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, among others. They threw in money for Republican primaries, Democratic ones. They've been sort of all over the place. And to me and to some of the experts people on our team have spoken to, that's really spelled out that they're just kind of slaying the groundwork for '28. They want to see where different, not just races land, but where the population is landing on all of these different issues, which I guess takes us to data centers, a topic that I did not think was going to consume 2026 for me, but here we are. Tori, we have been framing this election quite a lot as the data center referendum. We were not wrong. Across the country, there were 40 ballot measures about AI data center projects. Voters chose to restrict 39 of them, and an NBC exit poll found that almost a quarter of all voters said that data centers were crucial to their vote. Absolutely mind-boggling. Voters hated AI. Voters hated data centers. Talk to us about what you and science senior reporter Molly Taft reported out for WIRED.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, so I think a couple of things. First off, I think this sort of ties in many ways to people's resentment of the tech industry and its right word swing more generally, and data centers and AI are sort of the peak embodiment of that. And obviously there's the environmental concerns around data centers, and I think you really saw it as a galvanizing force in rural communities where these data centers are being put, where in communities that really would've more traditionally swung Republican, that it became this really bipartisan uniting effort around the fact that—

Leah Feiger: I can't think of another issue, honestly, that has galvanized.

Vittoria Elliott: I know, something we can all agree on.

Leah Feiger: Truly. Truly.

Vittoria Elliott: So to go back to South Carolina, for instance, Darline Graham got dubbed Data Center Darline because she was taking money from data center PACs. In Montana with Sam Forstag, who Democratic up and comer, fire jumper, his opponent also tarred and feathered with the data center label in a historically Republican district. So I think we are really seeing this moment where these things are touching down in communities that normally would be Republican, and they're seeing these impacts on their daily lives and having Republican representatives-

Leah Feiger: Or even just the threat of the impact on their daily lives. People were running on, "There could be a data center in your community. Don't worry, I'll stop it from happening." That was Chris Pappas in New Hampshire, for example.

Vittoria Elliott: Totally. And especially in places like Georgia and Texas where a lot of these things are already up and running or are planned, resounding, resounding population telling Republican lawmakers to step off with that. They're not interested. Telling people, "We're going to put this thing in your community. It's going to take up your water. It's going to be loud. It's going to be annoying. It's going to be expensive. It's going to drive up your electricity bills in the middle of an affordability crisis." And then saying to them, "And reward for all of that is it's going to take your job in the middle of a jobs crisis where tons and tons of people are struggling to find work." I just don't think that's a good selling point. And there were individual Republicans who ran saying that they wanted to regulate the AI industry, that they wanted to push back on data centers, but for the Democrats, it really became sort of a whole of party movement around this. And I think that really was rewarded at the ballot box.

Leah Feiger: Yeah. I mean, there were people who brought it into their victory speeches. Jon Ossoff, when he won his Senate race in Georgia, used his victory speech to specifically call out Silicon Valley titans who build bunkers and warned that their AI could cause human extinction. It was pretty incredible to witness. This is a rallying cry, but I wonder if it's going to be still a rallying cry in two years from now. Let's talk about the people who were very, very convinced that no matter what happened this election cycle, it was all going to be fraud. David, you reported out a story on Wednesday about how all of these election deniers who are usually the very, very first to say that something was wrong, that results were inaccurate, there has to be a recount, there has to be investigations, had nothing to say. Election deniers accepted the results. Talk to us about that.

David Gilbert: Yeah. As I was saying earlier, the MAGA crowd, their first reaction was silence and then they started the recriminations. But for election deniers, the silence has continued. There was hundreds of election deniers on the ballots, people who had backed Trump's claims that 2020 was a stolen election. Lots of those races still haven't been called. Some of them have won, but lots of them in their most consequential races have lost. People like Andy Biggs who was running for governor in Arizona or Mike Rogers who was running for Senate seat in Michigan, they both had backed Trump's calls in the wake of 2020 to overturn elections. Jim Marchant was running for Secretary of State in Nevada who was kind of one of the OG election deniers, and he got beaten easily by Cisco Aguilar, who's the incumbent there. But it was just incredible to see when they were making their concession speeches that they didn't mention elections or security or vote rigging or election fraud whatsoever. They didn't mention noncitizens.

Leah Feiger: All of your favorite buzzwords.

David Gilbert: Yeah, they mentioned none of them because in most of the cases, the margins of defeat were so great that it just made no sense. But equally, the groups who are kind of backing this movement, the groups like Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network, True to Vote, people like Patrick Byrne, who's funded much of this, they've just been silent, which makes me wonder, is this kind of the beginning of the end of that movement? Have we seen it better out that they've just realized now that, "No, these elections are secure, it's just people really don't like what Trump is doing and the policies that he has?"

Leah Feiger: Something that you had flagged a number of times in the lead up to the midterms was there were a number of election denier candidates running for attorney general races in states across the country and Secretary of State races. And those two positions don't tend to get a lot of attention, but they're really important because they have to do with how elections are run in those particular states, which would mean that 2028, the next large election coming up, could have been very well impacted had these candidates won their races. So there is this weird stopping point. Does it feel like the end of an era for you, David?

David Gilbert: Well look, I think we probably are talking about it too early because I think in 2024 we thought that maybe it was over because Trump had won so convincingly, so there was nothing for them to complain about and Trump himself didn't bring it up. But we saw that they came back very quickly again, and there was still a lot of money to be made for a lot of these groups because for a lot of people involved in this, it is a grift. They were making money, they were traveling across the country talking to people and getting paid for it. I do think based on the initial response that we've seen that lots of the people who were involved in this are tired. Some of the comments I was reading in some of the Telegram channels that I follow are people are just so tired of this and they seem like they no longer want to take part in it. So it's too early to say that this is the end, but it is possible that a lot of the energy that has been in this movement for six years now will dissipate.

Hugo Lowell: I'm just curious, David, to what extent do you think a lot of this is also follow the leader and the moment Trump came out pretty early on in election night and was like, "I'm going to accept the results." The rest of them thought, "OK, well, if we're not going to have our champion, we're going to stand down too."

David Gilbert: Yeah, I think that's a huge amount to do with it. He hasn't been as active in terms of getting involved in the nitty-gritty of this. He's been making claims that elections are rigged, but I think the movement was kind of self-sustaining, especially in 2025 after Trump had won. So they were able to sustain themselves in that period even when he wasn't promoting them. I do think the fact though that he has so quickly accepted defeats in these midterms and hasn't pushed back, I do think that's going to be a big issue for them and will be difficult for them to kind of get themselves motivated once again.

Leah Feiger: You guys, I want to talk predictions. Midterms, they're over. They're behind us. In January, we're going to have a whole new set of politicians on Capitol Hill, which means it is time to talk about the presidentials. There's a bunch of names that are already floating around, Jon Ossoff, AOC, Gavin Newsom, JD Vance, Marco Rubio. I'm curious, what you think. What are your predictions here? What's going to happen? What should we be looking out for in the next few months?

Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think one of the big things that we saw a lot of Democrats saying immediately last night was subpoena, subpoena, subpoenas, favorite word. And I think unfortunately that's going to run up against some real friction because as Congress, you can subpoena people, you can try and get them to testify, but ultimately all those federal agencies are under the executive branch. They have political leadership now under the Trump administration that is pretty hostile to Congress. And if you want to enforce that subpoena, you are going to need the DOJ to do that for you. And I can't see AG [Todd] Blanche super excited to assist in that. So I think as much as a lot of these Democrats are coming in saying, "We're ready to do accountability," and I do think they want to, I think the actual mechanisms through which they're going to be able to do that are going to be pretty narrowed, and that's something that they're probably going to have to get ahead of explaining to their constituents right now.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. Hugo, how about you?

Hugo Lowell: Yeah, just on the presidential question to Democrats, I think it's actually quite a wide open field and you'll have to see how the new dynamics and the new Congress play out. You do have these freshmen Democrats who are going to come in very, very aggressive. And then you also have people like Ossoff who are going to be riding on a wave of a lot of goodwill and a lot of momentum inside the Democratic Party. I think what's more interesting is Republicans because this really screws up a lot of timelines for people, two front-runners that keep getting mentioned, obviously JD Vance as the vice president, and then Rubio to a lesser extent. So on JD, there was a lot of thinking inside Trump world that JD, if it was an OK night, could announce pretty soon after the midterms. He had his donors more or less lined up, but it strikes me that that is now actually going to have to be paused. There is no way a Republican candidate can announce anytime soon with the stench of these midterms coming off on their coattails. It's just not possible. It's just a terrible, terrible political environment for Republicans. And it may only get worse if Trump decides to be an open warfare with Democrats on the Hill, and if he decides to go harder against Iran, that actually conversely might hurt Republicans more. And so I think JD Vance now has a very nuanced and difficult decision as to when he's going to announce, if ever. And as for someone like Marco Rubio, I have always been of the belief, and this is just me talking to people in Rubio's orbit, that he was not particularly enthralled about running this cycle. He saw JD as the heir apparent. There were a lot of movements inside Trump law to make sure that JD got it. And now again, he has a difficult decision. If he decides to run, does he wait for JD to announce and then potentially flame out? Or does he wait and see if he just announce at the same time as JD? Or does he decide actually JD's cooked and now is the time for him to announce, this is the moment for him and he should go right now? I mean, these are all questions that are really unanswerable. And my guess is actually everyone takes a step back, takes stock, see how the next maybe six, 12 months play out before they get going.

Leah Feiger: David, how about you? What do you think?

David Gilbert: Are we definitely ruling out a third term for Donald Trump? Is that off the table? Because Steve Bannon's still talking about it. He's still working on possibilities.

Leah Feiger: I love that this is the area of the internet that you're still steeped in. Obviously the four of us, different areas.

David Gilbert: It's interesting to me because obviously Trump, there's been a split in his base for quite a while now and we're seeing diverge even more after the midterms. But I'd love to know from Hugo actually, how important now, or is it important now, is Trump's endorsement? Because obviously for a long time, Trump was seen as the kingmaker and whoever he endorsed would be the person who would get the nomination. Has that weakened now because of the midterms?

Hugo Lowell: I think for congressional candidates, it's weakened. If you're a senator, if you're a member of Congress who your election coming up in two years time, I think the threat from White House officials, a threat from the president is not going to sway you. And by the way, we are already seeing this start to happen. Seeing people like Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie be like, "You know what? YOLO, this is going to be my last stint in Congress. I'm going to vote to release the Epstein files." And there was nothing Trump could do sticking Lauren Boebert in a situation room that could change her mind. I think though for the presidential, things are, again, more complicated because if you heard someone like JD, if you're someone like Rubio, do you want Trump's base to turn out for you? Yes. Can you disown them completely? I don't think it's that easy. You still need to pick up a coalition. You still have to put together this coalition of super MAGA voters who still like Trump and who will still vote for him. You can't just write off that section of the voting populace. You still have to bring those voters with you. And if you don't get Trump's endorsement or Trump endorses someone else, then you're absolutely not going to get those voters.

David Gilbert: It's a very tricky needle to tread that you have to be able to move away from the negative aspect of what Trump brings, but also bring in all those people, as you say, who will no matter what he does, will turn out from tens of millions of numbers, obviously.

Hugo Lowell: But I think what is notable though is this is clearly a voting coalition that is very fluid, and Trump could capture them in '24. He lost them this cycle, but there's nothing to suggest in 18 months time, who knows what the news cycle is like and where we are at, that they cannot be won over again. I think that's how Republicans are thinking when they kind of look forward to the '28 cycle and the primary season.

Leah Feiger: Is it bad to say that I'm really excited for '28? Guys, this is going to be so fun.

Hugo Lowell: Well, I'll be retiring. It's been a long road for this Trump reporter.

Leah Feiger: Hugo, David, Tori, thank you so much for joining us today. This was great.

Hugo Lowell: Thanks to be here.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you.

Leah Feiger: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Bandi, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact checked by Matt Giles and Daniel Roman. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.