‘This might just be the biggest defeat for big money in politics’: Billionaires poured hundreds of millions into Tuesday’s races and still lost

Some of the richest people in American politics spent heavily on Tuesday’s elections, and their side lost almost everywhere.

In Texas, Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton for the Senate, after Elon Musk spent more than $200 million to help elect Paxton, according to a New York Times analysis. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech billionaire, lost the governor’s race to Democrat Amy Acton after putting an estimated $36 million of his own money into it. In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms beat Republican billionaire Rick Jackson for governor. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who entered the year with $105.7 million on hand, conceded to Democrat Gina Hinojosa.

“I think this might just be the biggest defeat for big money in politics in American history,” Logan Phillips, founder of the election forecasting site Race to the White House, told Fortune. A series of Supreme Court decisions “opened up the floodgates for near unlimited levels of spending from billionaires and super PACs,” he said, and “Democrats were able to win these........

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