The second night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) took place on Tuesday, with speakers including former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. But two speakers earlier in the evening showed that there has long been a divide in the party.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke to the crowd earlier in the evening. After waxing poetic about the trillions of dollars spent in inflationary spending during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sanders launched into a familiar list of grievances.
“My fellow Americans, while 60 percent of our population lives paycheck to paycheck, the top 1 percent has never had it so good,” Sanders said. He laid out a list of policies that are well to the left of what President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had pursued in office, and “at the top of that to-do list is the need to keep big money out of our political process. Billionaires from both parties should not be able to buy elections, including primaries.”
And yet, oddly enough, Sanders was followed by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who boasted about his wealth to denounce former President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump thinks we should trust him on economic issues because he claims to be very rich,” Pritzker said. “But take it from a real billionaire, Trump is only rich in one thing: his stupidity!” Forbes estimates Pritzker’s fortune at $3.5 billion, while Trump’s true net worth has long been disputed.
When invoking the words actual billionairethe room erupted in cheers – a strange contrast to Sanders, who less than ten minutes earlier had sharply referred to people like Pritzker as “oligarchs.”
This stark contrast raises the question of what exactly the Democratic Party and its voters think about the members of the Three Comma Club.
For example, while Sanders has called out billionaires for “buying elections, including primaries,” Pritzker himself may be the worst offender: Between two gubernatorial elections, Pritzker spent a whopping $323 million of his own wealth. In addition, he donated another $24 million to the Democratic Governors Association in 2022 to run ads in the Republican primary supporting Senator Darren Bailey, who was considered a weaker opponent in the general election. (In fact, Pritzker defeated Bailey by more than 12 points.)
Pritzker was also one of the few finalists for Harris’s vice presidential nomination. Although he was not ultimately selected, he had at least two meetings with the campaign team and submitted thousands of pages of documents for review.
There are other Democratic and progressive billionaires, some of whom refute the claim that every election goes to the highest bidder. Businessman and climate activist Tom Steyer spent over $200 million in the 2020 Democratic primary but dropped out after finishing third in South Carolina. Michael Bloomberg spent over $1 billion the same year and won only American Samoa.
George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire investor who many Republicans see as a bogeyman, regularly donates hundreds of millions of dollars to democratic causes during each election campaign — in addition to the billions he has given to promote democracy in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
In recent years, however, some Democrats have expressed not only a dislike of billionaires but also a feeling that their very existence is obscene.
In 2019, newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in an interview that the mere existence of billionaires was a sign of an immoral society. “I don’t think that necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral,” she clarified, but “a system that allows billionaires to exist … is wrong.”
Dan Riffle, a lawyer who served as Ocasio-Cortez’s political adviser at the time, changed his Twitter handle to “Every Billionaire is a Political Failure.” He later stated: VoxDylan Matthews believes society should collectively prevent anyone from accumulating such wealth: “We can have all 300 and a few million Americans vote on it and set an average that everyone thinks is a reasonable amount of money. But at some point there has to be an upper limit, right?”
Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) have also proposed a wealth tax on assets deemed too large.
But that attitude may be receding in the Democratic Party. Speaking on the first night of the DNC this week, Ocasio-Cortez eschewed Sanders’ style of anti-billionaire populism and instead made a broader, more positive case for Harris as a presidential candidate. Yair Rosenberg noted of Ocasio-Cortez’s speech: The Atlantic that “the progressive congresswoman no longer speaks only to the left wing, but to the party as a whole.”
Of course, not everyone to the left of the aisle agrees. “Billionaires are a political mistake, tax this man until he’s a millionaire before he leaves the stage,” progressive journalist Ryan Grim posted during Pritzker’s speech on X.
Still, it presents Democrats with an interesting dilemma: Should they denounce the super-rich as a symptom of an immoral society, or make peace since some of them are on the same team?
