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“Money in politics” is far too broad a term.
Say you’re a Koch brothers libertarian-ish conservative. You want big immigration (including illegal, although you’re not too invested in amnesty), very low taxes particularly on the rich and on corporate earnings, and maybe you’re culturally moderately anti-woke and especially dislike that you got hit with some very expensive civil rights based employment rulings a few years ago but you still have a gay grandson or something.
Which cause are you going to donate a billion dollars to in the next cycle? The party of Stephen Miller, or the party of AOC?
Musk buying Twitter only “worked” (and again, whether it worked has yet to be decided, both on a long term cultural and on an economic basis) because there was already a large constituency of social conservatives who could use the platform to align and organize, especially on topics like immigration. That movement long predated the acquisition, Miller and Bannon had been central to Trump’s initial anti-illegal-immigration messaging in 2016, back when Musk was still a lib centrist and openly criticized Trump as ‘not the right guy’.
Now, back your big corporation. If I want deregulation and tax cuts, I might give a billion dollars to some centrist Dems and some libertarian Republicans. But then it turns out that a future Dem administration has a heavy presence of environmentalist progressives who dislike my polluting factories. And it turns out a future GOP administration contains politicians who owe fealty to and get support from a bunch of farmers or mining interests who don’t like me sourcing cheap inputs for my big business and like protectionist tariffs. So the billion dollars will be worth less than you might imagine.
Have you read the article? The winning tactic is to emulate the AIPAC. You talk to all candidates running for some South Dakota seat and see which one doesn't talk about mining regulations. You tell'em you will support them as long as they don't vote for mining regulations. Then your PAC trashes the reputation of all other candidates and your guy wins. Then you casually, but constantly mention this fact in every hotel lobby in DC: anyone who even thinks about mining regulations is your mortal enemy and you will gladly spend millions of dollars to tank their campaign.
The AIPAC strategy relies (or relied) on one central fact:
Most American voters and politicians were either ambivalent (which includes mild antipathy) or positive about Israel.
This meant that the average Democrat or Republican, outside a tiny handful of very progressive or substantially Muslim constituencies, lost nothing from taking AIPAC’s money. There was no tradeoff. Increasingly now there is, so AIPAC’s influence will likely decline.
You also can’t do the same thing as the libertarian. The Republican will get primaried if he isn’t sufficiently anti-immigration. The Democrat will get primaried if she supports lower taxes on the rich. These are issues where almost every voter, and every voter in the primaries, has a relatively strong opinion. “[Democrat] took five million dollars from the mining lobby to destroy our environment and the habitat of our birds and fishes” might easily be the different between winning and losing a tight primary.
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This only works if a lot of people really do oppose mining regulations, so spending millions of dollars is effective.
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