Which industries gave the most to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign according to OpenSecrets?
Executive summary
OpenSecrets maintains a “Top Industries” page that ranks contributions to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign and affiliated committees using Federal Election Commission data, but the specific industry-by-industry totals requested are not present in the excerpts provided; therefore this report summarizes what OpenSecrets’ methodology says and highlights the major donor sectors evident in the available reporting (FEC data basis noted 02/06/25) [1] [2] [3].
1. OpenSecrets is the source and it groups contributions by industry, but the exact ranked list is not in the supplied snippets
OpenSecrets compiles contributions by mapping donors’ reported employers and occupations into industry categories and then totals contributions to a candidate’s campaign committees plus supporting super PACs and hybrid PACs, with its Donald Trump 2024 industry totals derived from FEC electronic filings released in February 2025 [3] [1] [2].
2. The available reporting underscores big-money individuals tied to specific sectors — tech, finance, gambling/casinos and rail/banking — which effectively indicate the largest industry influences reported elsewhere
Independent analyses and OpenSecrets’ own reporting identify a set of megadonors whose wealth maps to particular industries: Elon Musk’s massive Republican donations point to technology and related interests (OpenSecrets counted Musk as the largest 2024 donor to Republican causes) [4], Timothy Mellon’s enormous giving is tied to finance/railroad-family wealth [5], Ken Griffin’s huge contributions reflect the hedge fund/finance sector [6], and Miriam Adelson’s multi‑figure giving comes from the casino/gambling industry [5] [6]; these high-dollar individuals and their affiliated outside groups dominated funding flows that OpenSecrets tracks [5] [4].
3. Why citing individual megadonors matters for an industry read — and why it’s imperfect
Because federal law bars corporations from giving directly, OpenSecrets attributes money to industries by aggregating contributions from corporate PACs, employees, owners and immediate family members, so very large gifts from a handful of individuals can skew an industry’s total (OpenSecrets’ methodology note) [3] [7]. This means that the presence of large tech, finance, or gambling donors in support of Trump often translates into those industries appearing near the top of industry rankings, but the pattern can reflect a small number of ultra‑wealthy actors rather than broad sector-wide grassroots support [7] [5].
4. Caveats, competing perspectives and what the provided reporting does not resolve
OpenSecrets’ industry totals depend on donors’ self-reported employer/occupation information and the coding decisions made by OpenSecrets staff — factors the organization explicitly documents — and the supplied excerpts do not include the numeric industry ranking or dollar amounts for Trump’s 2024 cycle, so this analysis cannot produce a definitive ranked list from those snippets alone [7] [1]. Other reporting highlights that super PACs and dark‑money nonprofits amplified the influence of megadonors (who are concentrated in tech, finance, and related industries), a dynamic noted by the Brennan Center and OpenSecrets coverage of mega-donor patterns [5] [4].
5. Bottom line
According to OpenSecrets’ approach and the contemporaneous reporting available here, the industries most visibly linked to the largest flows of money supporting Donald Trump in 2024 were tech, finance/hedge funds/banking, and gambling/casino interests—largely because a handful of extraordinarily large individual donors from those sectors dominated the cycle—however the exact ranked industry totals from OpenSecrets’ “Top Industries” page are not shown in the provided sources, and the interpretation must account for OpenSecrets’ attribution method and the outsized role of mega‑donors [1] [3] [5] [4] [7].