With the baseball season kicking off today, OpenSecrets took a deep dive into the history of political giving by some of Major League Baseball's most prominent owners.

Among our findings:

As Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election approaches on April 1, record-breaking spending has drawn the public's attention. The surge in election spending, driven in part by billionaires on both sides of the political spectrum from within and outside the state, is raising concerns about the influence of money on what is supposed to be a nonpartisan judicial race.

Left-leaning candidate Susan Crawford has raised more than $24 million. Philanthropist George Soros, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman have made major donations to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which then transferred funds to her campaign. She faces Brad Schimel, a conservative judge who was endorsed by President Trump last week. Schimel has raised more than $12 million. He has the financial backing of billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent millions supporting Schimel through his America PAC. Also, the dark money group Building America's Future, whose funding has been linked to Musk in the past, has been spending heavily on this race.

Musk, the biggest donor during the 2024 election cycle and now a top White House advisor, is repeating his playbook from the presidential election: He is offering $100 to Wisconsin voters who sign a petition “in opposition to activist judges,” or refer others to sign it. The petition reads: “Judges should interpret laws as written, not rewrite them to fit their personal or political agendas. By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role — interpreting, not legislating.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has been at the center of a firestorm this week after he added a journalist to a Signal chat with other senior officials discussing plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen. 

Waltz, 51, was elected in 2018 to represent Florida in the House and served until Jan. 20, 2025, resigning in the early days of his fourth term to join the Trump administration. He served on the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees during his six years on Capitol Hill. 

Waltz served in the U.S. Army in the late 1990s and then in the Army National Guard until becoming national security advisor. He was the first Green Beret to serve in Congress and went on multiple combat tours to Afghanistan, for which he received four Bronze Stars. 

Prior to his election, Waltz was director for Afghanistan policy in the office of the secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration and advised Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism and South Asia. In 2010, he founded the defense and intelligence advising firm Metis Solutions and has made frequent appearances on Fox News. 

His wife, Julia Nesheiwat, was homeland security adviser in the first Trump administration. Trump nominated her sister, Janette Nesheiwat, to be surgeon general. 

Tech mogul and top White House advisor Elon Musk donated more than $291 million to Republican candidates, political action committees and other outside spending organizations in the 2024 election cycle. While he was, by far, the biggest political donor, he was not the only person to contribute more than $100 million. 

The top six political donors — Musk, banking scion Timothy Mellon, casino owner Miriam Adelson, shipping supplies magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, hedge fund CEO Kenneth Griffin, and trading firm co-founder Jeffrey Yass and his wife Janine — all gave $100 million or more, and all supported Republican candidates and causes.

The seventh biggest donor was hedge fund CEO Paul Singer ($66.8 million), another Republican supporter. He was followed by the top donors to Democrats: politician and businessman Michael Bloomberg ($64 million) and entrepreneur Dustin Moskovitz ($51 million).

While most of the top donors showed clear preferences for either Democrats or Republicans, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (co-founders of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) focused their giving on a pro-crypto group that supported and opposed candidates from both parties.

K Street crashes into ‘nearly un-lobbyable’ Elon Musk (Politico)

With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left (The New York Times)

‘Blatantly Pro-Corruption’: Trump Guts Anti-Money Laundering Rule (Sludge)

Pay-to-play boom (Politico)

Has Elon Musk’s PAC in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race set the record for outside spending on state court elections? (Wisconsin Watch)

The nonprofit campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets tracks cumulative independent group spending in state supreme court and appellate court races through 2024. Its figures indicate the biggest spender nationally is the Citizens for Judicial Fairness, which spent a total of $11.4 million in the 2020 and 2022 Illinois court races.

There’s no mystery about why Trump is axing federal employees. They don’t support him (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

Take the Internal Revenue Service, where I looked at the first 500 political donations that came up from OpenSecrets.org’s database for the 2024 election cycle. Wouldn’t you know it, more than 90% of them went to Democrats and their union allies. Among those 500 donations were seven to Trump compared to dozens for Kamala Harris.  

How influencers and politicians built an unregulated supplement empire (Mashable)

This regulatory gap has allowed supplement companies to operate with minimal red tape — and they've spent significant resources ensuring those regulations stay lax. Between 2004 and 2014, the industry primarily lobbied Republicans, but in 2016, lobbying efforts shifted toward Democrats. By 2024, however, the industry overwhelmingly favored Republicans, with $1.5 million more spent on GOP candidates than Democrats, according to Open Secrets — the widest gap to date.

Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff vows defiance to Trump ahead of 2026 election (The Associated Press)

Any race in Georgia is likely to be closely contested and fantastically expensive. The twin Senate races in 2020, when Ossoff and Warnock narrowly won and flipped control of the Senate to Democrats, cost more than $900 million combined, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending. Warnock’s 2022 reelection over Republican Herschel Walker cost more than $470 million, OpenSecrets found. 

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