How a little-known Maine ballot initiative could defang super PACs before the 2028 election

WASHINGTON — Maine has become a staging ground for the latest battle to end the practice of limitless super PAC donations that has dominated American politics for the past 15 years.In 2024, voters in the Pine Tree State, by a margin of almost three-to-one, approved a ballot initiative limiting super PAC donations to $5,000 per person or entity.“It demonstrates that this is a deeply purple issue; there was no difference in the results in red districts or blue districts,” said Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor whose nonprofit Equal Citizens is leading the effort to defend the referendum.The ensuing legal fight — Dinner Table Action v.Schneider — has emerged as one of the most consequential scrums over money in politics in recent years and could radically transform the 2028 presidential election. In July, Portland federal judge Karen Frink Wolf struck down the campaign finance restrictions created by the ballot measure, ruling that they violated the First Amendment “because there is no set of circumstances where they could be applied constitutionally.”Lessig decried Wolf’s ruling as “the most extreme opinion ever in the history of the federal judiciary,” claiming that it found that “even if you can see there’s a risk of corruption, there’s nothing the state can do about it.”The ruling has been appealed and is pending before the Boston-based First Circuit Court of Appeals.Super PACs emerged as a phenomenon right after the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision in January 2010, which eliminated federal limits on individual or corporate spending in elections.Since then, tens of billions of dollars have been pumped into campaigns, with more than $5.1 billion being raised by super PACs in 2024, according to an analysis from OpenSecrets — dwarfing that of principal campaign committees, which are subject to caps on individual donations. “The Supreme Court’s not going to revers...