Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024: Donor Gaps

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, continues its Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 rollout today with a preliminary analysis of donor demographics in political fundraising. In the Donor Gaps: Demographics Analysis section of Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024, CAWP experts examine the participation of women donors with additional detail about race/ethnicity, educational attainment, marital status, and party affiliation. We also investigate how these donor characteristics correspond to recipient gender and party.

“Previous reports in our Women, Money, and Politics series have shown women lag men as political donors and in the total amount contributed — a persistent form of political underrepresentation,” said lead author and CAWP Senior Scholar Kira Sanbonmatsu. “We’ll be watching this donor demographic data closely to gauge whether women’s voices are being heard through campaign contributions in this crucial election.”

Donor Gaps: Demographics Analysis begins with a preliminary analysis of the relationship between donor and recipient characteristics for congressional races from the 10 key states focused on in Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington. Future additions to the donor demographics section will include analyses of state level races in these 10 focus states and a national analysis of congressional races in all fifty states. 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.

Other upcoming additions to our Women, Money, & Politics Watch coverage include examinations of fundraising recipient data in state races in our key states and congressional races in all fifty states. These various data collections will update throughout election 2024 as data becomes available and is incorporated into the analysis.

Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 is part of the CAWP Women, Money, and Politics series, undertaken in collaboration with OpenSecrets; previous reports in the series can be found here, including last year’s Donor Gap report about state elections. Voter demographic data in Donor Gaps: Demographics Analysis comes from Catalist. This research is made possible thanks to the generosity and commitment of Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company. Follow Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 as it develops at the project landing page and find all CAWP data about women in election 2024 at Election Watch.