What We're Watching: Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026

We recently launched CAWP’s Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 — a project that will follow the gender implications of campaign finance with the help of data from OpenSecrets. We’re analyzing major party candidates – women and men – in congressional elections with a focus on money raised from individuals, as well as data on candidates contributing funds to their own campaigns . We’ll also be exploring the demographics of donors.  

What We’re Watching

Our data visualizations, powered by Graphicacy, are interactive, offering views of the data by candidate gender, party, and incumbency status, as well as women’s racial/ethnic background. 

Here’s what we’re watching in 2026: 

Total Raised from Individuals: Who’s winning the money race for individual donors?

Contributions raised from individuals are an important source of candidates’ campaign receipts, usually comprising the majority of candidates’ funds during the primary election stage.    

In previous reports in CAWP’s Women, Money, and Politics Series, we analyzed the role of money in congressional and state elections, including in our 2024 report. While money doesn’t buy elections, the costs of campaigns are rising, and monetary resources can help candidates mobilize their supporters.

Through this work, we have found that women are formidable fundraisers: women can raise similar amounts to men when running in similar races. Indeed, some of the most expensive, competitive congressional races often feature women candidates, and women often lead the money race. Yet, our research has also found some aspects of fundraising that are more challenging for women — particularly women from historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups and Republican women. 

As we have done in the past, we are separating the data visualizations by incumbency status. Despite gains in women’s officeholding, congressional incumbents remain overwhelmingly men. Women overall can be considered to be disadvantaged indirectly due to gender differences in incumbency status: all nonincumbent candidates, including women, are less likely to reap the fundraising benefits of incumbency.

In short, as we did in 2024, we’ll be watching to see how women are faring as they gather resources to campaign effectively, looking at both U.S. House and U.S. Senate contests and considering how party affiliation, race/ethnicity, and incumbency interact with women’s fundraising totals. 

Self-Financing: Do women lag men in the likelihood of self-financing their campaigns?

We’ve studied self-financed contributions in congressional and state elections in our previous reports. Candidates with the means to self-fund have more flexibility about their candidacies and fundraising strategies and may have more time to campaign as a result. Self-financing is important to watch with a gender lens. Due to the pay gap and the gender gap in wealth, women are less likely to have the ability to fund their own campaigns. 

We’ll be watching to see what role self-financing plays in 2026. We’ll be looking to see if gender and racial/ethnic disparities persist in which candidates can afford to contribute to their own campaigns.

Small Contributions: Are women raising more of their contributions from donations $200 or less?

Through CAWP’s Women, Money, and Politics Series, we’ve analyzed the structure of campaign receipts to see if women are more reliant on small contributions in congressional and state races. Small contributions may be a mechanism for women to compete with men’s personal wealth and financial networks. At the same time, raising more contributions through smaller denominations may make fundraising more time-intensive for women candidates.

We’re following this story to determine if women are tapping these smaller contributions more than men in 2026 congressional contests as they have in the past. We’ll also be analyzing average contribution size by women’s race/ethnicity and political party. 

Initial 2026 Takeaways

In our first 2026 release, called The National View: Congressional Elections, we provide campaign finance data on fundraising for all congressional races (displaying campaign finance data available through January 31, 2026). The data are organized with views by state, chamber, and seat status. 

In this initial release, we are seeing that women are competing in some of the most competitive and expensive congressional races, with women candidates often leading the money race for donations from individuals. However, we also see that in some cases, the average amount raised by women trails the average amount raised by men. Meanwhile, in some of the open congressional seats that The Cook Political Report rates as very likely to elect a Republican, no Republican women had reported campaign finance data — indicating that it’s unlikely Republican women will wage campaigns for those winnable seats. 

Small-dollar contributions are usually more characteristic of women’s campaign receipts than men’s. To date, the average proportion of funds raised by Democratic women and men from contributions of $200 or less is similar. However, Republican women running for the U.S. House are raising a higher average proportion of funds from small contributions than Republican men, while the reverse is true in U.S. Senate races.  

So far, we’re seeing support for one of the trends we’ve seen in our prior research: when comparisons are made by party and seat status, women usually have a lower average proportion of funds from self-financed contributions than men. We’re also seeing that in the most competitive congressional races (according to The Cook Political Report), all of the top ten candidates in proportion of funds raised from self-financing are men. 

Together, these gender differences confirm that women and men continue to rely on somewhat different fundraising strategies in 2026 congressional contests.  

Stay Tuned

Stay tuned for our first Donor Demographics release later this spring. We will also be updating The National View: Congressional Elections following the April Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing deadline. The forthcoming donor analysis will provide insight into whose voices are being heard in American politics today through campaign contributions. Through their contributions, donors have the power to shape the candidate pool and help candidates reach the ballot, as well as campaign effectively.