Seantor Ted Cruz by DonkeyHotey
Credit: Flickr

Whether it’s the Koch brothers or Soros on the left or Sheldon,” former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently said, “if you’re going to have an election process that radically favors billionaires and is discriminating against the middle class—which we now have—then billionaires are going to get a lot of attention.”

Those are, pun intended, rich words coming from a man whose 2012 candidacy was almost single-handedly bankrolled by a billionaire casino magnate. More than anybody, Gingrich profited from the new limitless heights of election spending, as $15 million turned Gingrich from a disgraced former speaker to a viable presidential contender, the first in four decades to win South Carolina without taking the White House.

The 2012 GOP race was marked by the presence of billionaires anointing candidates with their millions and gaining outsized influence over the outcome, duration, and policies of the GOP primary. The 2016 race, only a couple months old, looks to be following the same course. Here are […]