A hotel heir, a former TV doctor, a construction magnate, a former US ambassador, and the sons of two top-tier professional sports owners.
This is not the setup to an elaborate joke, but rather, a cross-section of the ultra-wealthy candidates who have together spent more than $435 million (and counting) during the 2022 midterm election cycle.
Put another way: self-funding candidates have spent more money than the nation of Palau's most recent GDP or just enough to buy Colorado's Major League Soccer team.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker easily tops the list. An heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, the incumbent Democrat has spent over $152 million on his 2022 reelection campaign alone.
Other political self-funders haven't been so lucky — underscoring a little-appreciated truth in politics that wealthy people who rely mostly on their own money to run often don't win the seats they're seeking.
A prime example in 2022: Lynda "Lindy" Blanchard, Trump's former US ambassador to Slovenia, who dropped more than $1.1 million into a US Senate campaign before abandoning that effort in favor of a primary challenge to Republican Gov. Kay Ivey. After Blanchard spent almost $6 million more in her second race of the election cycle, Ivey beat her anyway — by about 36 percentage points.
Despite its self-evident benefit of instant cash, self-funding a political campaign is risky. Candidates who raise gobs of money from donors, instead of their own bank account, receive the added benefit of engaging with and energizing an electorate — something that's critical to actually getting people to vote for you.
Almost all of the top self-funders thus far are white men, illustrating how the racial wealth gap can trickle down from corporate America to Congress and governor's mansions.
As for the source of their fortunes, some are clear beneficiaries of generational privilege, boasting connections to some of America's most famous brands. Others simply took the reins of family-run companies, expanding their reach. Some forged their business success themselves.
Insider analyzed federal and state campaign finance data, as well as data compiled by nonpartisan research organization OpenSecrets, to get a complete picture of the biggest spenders as of the end of October.
Here they are in the order of the size of their self-funding, as of November 2: