Hello, and welcome to the Byron York Show, the No Chip Chat Podcast, and we'd like to

get right into it.

And what we're going to get into today is not just the Republican 2024 race, although

we're going to be talking about that quite a bit, but something called the donor class.

So it's really the Republican race and the donor class.

We've probably been seeing and listening to a lot of media talk about the Republican donor

class and its preferences in the 2024 Republican presidential race, the donor class being,

of course, big donors, as Bernie Sanders would say, millionaires and billionaires who give

a lot of money to the party and have a lot of say.

So there's a natural tendency at this stage of the contest to focus and talk a lot about

the donor class for three reasons, actually one, people with billions of dollars hold an

outsized place in journalist minds, say, just like, wow, there's a billionaires at

very big deal.

I'll write about them to the political class, which is composed of candidates and consultants

and office holders and media people and just other people involved in the big business

of politics, that the political class sees money as an important measure of a candidate's

viability.

Got to raise a lot of money, big, important candidate, hadn't raised much money, loser.

Third reason, if candidates kiss up to billionaires, candidates kiss up to billionaires and

lavish attention on them, and that gets them into stories.

And actually there's a fourth reason too.

It's the most important reason.

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