Fifteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations have constitutional free-speech rights to spend money influencing elections, virtually all federal efforts to rein in political spending have fizzled out. Most elected officials now rely on outside groups, such as super PACs that accept unlimited donations, to help bankroll their campaigns.
But even as such fundraising breaks new records – super PACs spent around $2.7 billion in the 2024 election cycle – reform advocates in two states are pushing back. Maine and Montana are challenging, in different ways, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of campaign finance laws. Whether they succeed could matter for future elections – and not only in these states. Reformers hope to lay out a blueprint for how states can regulate corporations, unions, and “dark money” groups that play an outsize role in determining who is elected to public office.
These efforts to reform campaign finance come against a backdrop of what many scholars call a degradation of U.S. democracy, lately exemplified by the partisan battle to redraw legislative maps ahead of 2026 midterms. To match Republican gerrymanders, Democrats are ditching past commitments to fairer maps that good-governance groups have championed.
Why We Wrote This
The role of outside money in elections has grown exponentially since the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that political spending is a form of speech. Now, some advocates of campaign finance reform hope to impose limits through the states, with Maine and Montana leading the way.
For candidates, to voluntarily spurn super PACs and dark money groups that don’t disclose their donors would amount to unilateral disarmament in an arms race. “Both parties have become dependent on that money,” says Robert Boatright, a professor of politics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, who studies campaign finance.
Outside groups are technically not allowed to coordinate with campaigns, but that’s proved to be a meaningless distinction, Professor Boatright adds. “The [Supreme] Court’s theory was that independent spending was entirely beyond a candidate’s control, but what we’ve seen over the past 15 years is that it’s not necessary for people spending this money to talk to candidates about what they’re doing. It’s obvious what would benefit the candidate,” he says.
Strong support for limits on political spending
Citizens United was controversial from the start. During his 2010 State of the Union address, a week after the verdict was announced, President Barack Obama warned it would “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was in the audience, was seen mouthing “not true” in response.
Recent polling shows that voters are worried about the influence of money in politics and that majorities in both parties support limits on how much rich people and businesses can spend on campaigns.
Last November, voters in Maine overwhelmingly backed a ballot initiative to limit super PAC contributions to $5,000 per person. The limit only applies to state elections. Advocates say the $5,000 cap was chosen because it polled well; voters perceived a far greater risk of corruption when donations were at this level or higher. The law also requires the disclosure of all donors, regardless of amount, to outside groups.
A month after the measure passed, Alex Titcomb joined a federal lawsuit to block the law. Mr. Titcomb, who runs Dinner Table, a conservative grassroots organization in Maine, says it’s unconstitutional for state or federal regulators to cap donations to groups like his that engage on political issues.
“Campaign contributions are a free speech issue,” he says. “People gather together to influence their government, and that’s what the First Amendment is all about.”
In July, a federal judge in Maine agreed with Mr. Titcomb, ruling that the voter-backed law was unconstitutional and ordering a permanent injunction.
But the ruling hasn’t deterred Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who helped craft the Maine ballot initiative. A longtime advocate for campaign finance reform, he expected the lawsuit. He wants an appeal to be heard in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court. His goal is to show that federal courts have “made a mistake” in interpreting Citizens United to allow super PACs to raise unlimited funds around political campaigns.
The Maine law limits contributions, not expenditures, and doesn’t challenge the right of corporations to spend on political speech, notes Professor Lessig. What it does challenge is the legal basis of super PACs, entities that are supposed to be separate from campaigns and, unlike them, can accept unlimited donations, including from dark money groups.
In Citizens United, the Supreme Court said that the government couldn’t limit the political speech of some groups in order to level the playing field for all, an argument that lawmakers had used to justify caps on donations. The only justification for limits on corporations and unions, the court ruled, was to prevent quid pro quo corruption or the appearance of such corruption.
Professor Lessig says this last point is why states should have the right to limit donations to super PACs: They have become conduits for political corruption. When New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat, was convicted last year of accepting bribes and obstructing justice, the court heard that bribes were paid by his direction to a super PAC. And while super PACs are supposed to be independent of campaigns, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk and his super PAC to run ground campaigns in 2024 battleground states. Mr. Musk was subsequently given a non-Cabinet position in the Trump administration.
“Nobody is stopping [wealthy donors] from spending money on an issue,” says Professor Lessig. What Maine is trying to do, he says, is to ultimately ask the Supreme Court to “consider whether the First Amendment protects contributions to independent political action committees.”
He’s not seeking to overturn Citizens United, but a related decision known as SpeechNOW.org. In 2010, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled, citing Citizens, that independent groups could accept unlimited contributions to produce attack ads and other political communications as long as they didn’t work directly with candidates. This ruling lit the fuse for the explosion in super PACs and other “independent expenditure” groups.
Mr. Titcomb acknowledges that Maine’s ballot measure was popular with voters. But he says that was not because of concerns about corruption but because they’re “sick of [political] TV and text messages. They think a cap would reduce” the volume.
First Maine, next Montana?
Maine isn’t the first state to try to target the flow of outside money that resulted from Citizens United, says Professor Boatright. But absent a makeover of the Supreme Court, which has tilted further to the right since 2010, he sees state campaign-finance laws as similar to the abortion bans passed by GOP-run states before the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. States that pass campaign finance restrictions, he says, will essentially have “made a statement and put down a marker for the future.”
Montana may be next: A proposed 2026 ballot initiative would, if passed, amend the state constitution to end the power of corporations and dark money groups to spend unlimited sums on politics. The “Montana Plan” would effectively neuter Citizens United by changing corporate law, which is state – not federal – law. Proponents say it could be a blueprint for other states to regulate campaign finance. It would also apply to corporations that are registered in other states.
“We have the history to lead on this,” says Jeff Mangan, a former Democratic state lawmaker and former commissioner of political practices, a state agency unique to Montana that oversees campaign finance regulations.
In 1912, Montana pioneered legal curbs on corporate money in politics in reaction to meddling by the state’s powerful copper industry. Nearly a century later, the state Supreme Court ruled that Montana wasn’t bound by Citizens United because of its history of restricting corporate spending, a ruling that was struck down in 2012 by the Supreme Court.
Mr. Mangan heads the Transparent Election Initiative, which has drafted the Montana Plan initiative and submitted it to regulators. The plan distinguishes between the rights that corporations have to spend money around elections, which Citizens United upheld, and the powers granted by states to corporations. Deny corporations the power to spend, and the rights then don’t apply, he argues. “It’s a different way of looking at the problem,” he says.
Even some experts on campaign finance who oppose Citizens United have questioned whether this would stand up to higher court review. Critics call it a political stunt backed by special interests that’s too clever by half. “People are scratching their heads and wondering how it’s going to work,” says Brock Lowrance, a GOP operative from Montana who was the independent expenditure director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2024.
Former Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who lost his seat last year, is among the proposed ballot measure’s supporters. Former Gov. Marc Racicot, the only Republican publicly supporting it, broke with his party to vote for Joe Biden in 2020.
Mr. Mangan says what he hears from regular voters in Montana is frustration about outside money pouring into the state, including by groups that mask their donors. “We need to do something about money in politics, regardless of who’s in power,” he says.
