Rafael Behr: Musk spent 474 million dollars losing midterms and Texas answered

Elon Musk spent $224 million trying to prop up Republican candidates in Texas in last week's midterm elections — and lost. He is reported to have spent a further $250 million failing to engineer results in other races. Rafael Behr, writing in the Guardian, reads the result as a message that extends well beyond Texas: voters do not want to be owned by billionaires.

The pattern Behr identifies is not campaign finance in the ordinary sense but something closer to acquisition. James Talarico, the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988, made defiance of Musk's meddling a central rallying cry and won. Musk, whose adoptive home state it is, turned a Senate race into a referendum on himself, and the electorate returned the verdict.

The British variant is Nigel Farage. According to the Electoral Commission, all parties and campaign organisations together spent £94.5 million in the year before the last UK general election — less, Behr notes, than a serious bid for mayor of a mid-sized American city might cost. Into that small market came two cryptocurrency billionaires. Christopher Harborne, based in Thailand, gave Farage £5 million shortly before the 2024 election — a gift Farage did not register once elected, and which the parliamentary standards commissioner is about to rule on. Harborne then gave Reform UK £9 million in 2025 and £36 million earlier this year, the last sum chosen, Behr reports, to equal the £36 million donated days earlier by another crypto billionaire, Ben Delo. Donations matched like bids at an auction.

The consequences are already priced in. A damning verdict from the standards commissioner could suspend Farage from the Commons and trigger a recall petition and another byelection — which Farage pre-empted once before, fighting one against a novelty candidate dressed as a space-travelling dustbin to put his case before what he called the court of public opinion. Meanwhile Reform UK has lost its polling lead, fallen behind Labour in every survey, dropped to third behind the Conservatives in some, and a majority of voters now say they dislike Farage personally — deeply enough that tactical-voting blocs have formed against his candidates.

Behr's conclusion is narrower than the spending: when a party's funding base is two men, voters treat the party as the men's asset, and behave accordingly. Musk bought the most expensive losing ticket in American political history to learn the same thing.