The convenient fiction about American campaign finance is that it is a mass phenomenon — millions of small donors, a distributed civic act. The plumbing supports that story: ActBlue and WinRed processed roughly $8.9 billion between them across the 2022 and 2024 cycles, most of it in increments small enough to be a lunch.

But the rails are not the money. Strip them out and what remains is a far smaller structure, where twelve committees accounted for $4.85 billion of actual political spending over those two cycles. Each of those twelve resolves, on inspection, to a handful of names. Often to one.