Women Candidates Less Likely to Self-Finance Campaigns in Election 2024

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, provides updates to our campaign finance series, Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024. First, CAWP experts have analyzed fundraising recipient data about congressional candidates in 10 key states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington), and, second, CAWP has launched a new phase of the project incorporating state-level candidate information into the dataset.

CAWP’s preliminary analysis about congressional candidate fundraising in our project key states finds that:

• Men candidates running for U.S. House seats usually report a larger share of funds from self-financing than women. This points to a significant barrier to women’s political participation — party gatekeepers value self-financed candidates because they are less reliant on party resources.
• Women incumbent and challenger candidates running for the U.S. House usually raise more of their funds from small contributions than men candidates.
• Men candidates running for open seats for the U.S. House, however, are somewhat more likely than women to raise more of their funds from small contributions. Though there are significantly fewer open-seat races than incumbent vs. challenger contests.

In addition, we have expanded phase one of the project, The State View: A Deep Dive into 10 States, to include preliminary data for 2024 state legislative and statewide executive elections from OpenSecrets for four of our ten focus states: Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. This data tracks averages of amounts raised from individual donors, self-financing, and small-dollar contributions with comparisons between men and women candidates, partisan disparities, and the data is filterable by women’s race and ethnicity.

Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 uses interactive data visualizations powered by Graphicacy that are downloadable and shareable; follow the story as it develops on the project landing page and learn about donor gaps in election 2024 from our recent analysis. This project 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 Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company. Find all CAWP data about women in election 2024 at Election Watch.