Who are the groups backing candidates in the midterms – and why? In our second live discussion ahead of the elections, Joseph Gedeon, Dara Kerr and Chris Stein are live now

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nycreader2 asks: If someone donated millions of dollars to a political campaign, what would they realistically expect to get out of it? Are there things we can actually trace from political spending to policy decisions, or is that much harder to establish?

Dara: This is tricky because when we see big donations to political campaigns, we don’t usually hear politicians say they’re making policy decisions to benefit that donor. That said, I think we can infer cause-and-effect in some situations.

The biggest example that comes to mind is Elon Musk spending at least $250m to get Donald Trump elected in 2024. That was one of the largest individual donor contributions we’ve seen in a US presidential campaign. The day Trump was inaugurated, one of his first actions in office was to create the Department of Government Efficiency and put Musk in charge. In the following months, we saw Musk and his cohort dismantle many government agencies that were charged with regulating his network of companies.

Chris: Super Pacs tied to cryptocurrency spent millions in the primaries, though they didn’t always achieve the desired result. One of the major players is called Fairshake, which has made more than $13.3m in independent expenditures this year in Illinois, including nearly $2.5m against state lawmaker La Shawn Ford, who nonetheless won the Democratic primary for a US House district, and nearly $9.9m against lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton, who won the Democratic Senate nomination anyway. They also spent about $800,000 against state senator Robert Peters, who lost the primary for another US House district. That’s not the last we’ll hear of Fairshake this cycle — they are reportedly planning to spend $30m against Sherrod Brown, a Democrat and cryptocurrency foe who is running to return to the Senate in Ohio.