Campaign Legal Center

With every other vote now counted, and next year's balance of Washington power still in limbo, the wallets of the nation's politically active businesses, advocacy groups and people have opened wide over Georgia.

Next month's paired runoffs will decide partisan control of the Senate, and thereby the limits of President-elect Joe Biden's mandate. So it's little surprise that in the past six weeks they've combined to become the most expensive congressional election in American history.

Nonetheless, the numbers are staggering — and made even more so by the speed at which hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the state: baskets of checks to the candidates from millionaires, buckets of cash poured in by corporations and advocacy groups, waves of small-dollar online donations, open-ended commitments from the political parties and untold millions more in secretive spending by "dark money" groups.

Nineteen days before Georgians have their say, in other words, their state has already become Exhibit A for the excesses and potential abuses of a wide-open and minimally regulated campaign finance system. And all good-government groups can do is watch, hoping this case study someday helps their aspirations for corralling money's sway over politics.