Follow the Money with CAWP’s Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026
Today, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, launched Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 following gender implications in campaign finance, from donor and recipient perspectives, throughout the 2026 election season. This is the second election cycle during which CAWP is reporting on women and political fundraising during a live election cycle, following Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024.
Already available on Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 is our National View: Congressional Elections, providing campaign finance data for all contests for U.S. House and Senate seats. This resource currently displays campaign finance data available through January 31, 2026. The page tracks averages of amounts raised from individual donors, self-financing, and small-dollar contributions with comparisons between men and women candidates and breakdowns by party. The data is also filterable by women’s race and ethnicity, and users can access data for U.S. House and U.S. Senate races for each state.
“How money is raised during campaigns is not always transparent. With this project, we are making fundraising patterns and information about the demographics of donors more widely available,” said CAWP Senior Scholar Kira Sanbonmatsu. “Previous CAWP research on money and politics has found gender differences in how money is raised, particularly in the extent to which candidates rely on small contributions and fund their own campaigns. Will these disparities continue in 2026?”
The National View will update throughout election 2026 as data becomes available and is incorporated into the analysis. The data in Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 is presented using interactive data visualizations powered by Graphicacy.
In the coming weeks, CAWP will launch Donor Gaps, an additional Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 resource that analyzes the demographics of donors to congressional candidates. Interactive data visualizations created by Graphicacy will enable users to examine the demographics of donors to U.S. Senate and U.S. House candidates by recipient gender and recipient party. Users will be able to view the proportion of funds contributed by donors along demographic lines such as gender, race/ethnicity, and education, as well as view the share of unique contributors from those demographic groups.
“In addition to following the 2026 money race from the candidate’s perspective, we will be watching to see if men are still giving the majority of funds donated to congressional candidates, as they did in 2024,” said Sanbonmatsu.
Women, Money, & Politics Watch is part of the CAWP Women, Money, and Politics series, undertaken in collaboration with OpenSecrets; previous reports in the series can be found here. This research is made possible thanks to the generosity and commitment of Pivotal. Critical funding support for Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 was provided by Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden. Follow Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 as it develops at the project landing page and find all CAWP data about women in election 2026 at Election Watch.
For data on the previous election cycle, the first during which CAWP collected fundraising data during a live election, visit Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024.