Campaign fundraising in the 2026 Senate battlegrounds has become overwhelmingly nationalized, leaving most high-stakes candidates far more reliant on out-of-state donors than the voters they hope to represent.
Continuing a decades-long retreat from locally sourced campaign money, an OpenSecrets analysis of 17 candidates across nine key battleground states shows that two-thirds of the $289 million in individual contributions raised through mid-July came from out-of-state donors. Fourteen candidates received the majority of their individual contributions from beyond their borders.
“Most House and Senate races are fairly nationalized anyway,” Kenneth Miller, a University of Nevada Las Vegas political science professor who has researched the trend, told OpenSecrets. “The notion that all politics is local … that was probably never true in the first place.”
The findings highlight how increasingly uncommon home-state donor dominance has become in modern Senate races – reinforcing a pattern that has sharpened across recent election cycles. Several structural forces are driving the shift. Experts point to limited donor bases in less-populated states from Maine to Alaska, the rise of online fundraising platforms like WinRed and ActBlue, and a national donor class focused on controlling congressional majorities rather than backing local candidates.
While Democrats tend to lean more heavily on national donor networks and Republicans balance local roots with national party infrastructure and support from deep-pocketed outside groups, the issue is far more complex than a simple red-vs.-blue divide. And with razor‑thin margins in Congress and only a handful of states dictating the balance of power, the nationalization of campaign finance is likely to intensify – forcing candidates to navigate a delicate balance between the out-of-state donors fueling their campaigns and the local voters filling the ballot boxes.
“Everybody understands that a senator’s primary responsibility is to their state, and then probably to their political party and what’s happening nationally,” Northeastern University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos told OpenSecrets. “But there’s a steep price to pay for ignoring one’s electorate. And so elected officials will think very carefully about the interests and priorities of their states or districts. They will be top of mind in any decisions these individuals make. But oftentimes, the views of those constituencies – or, at least, those that supported them … are often aligned with what the donors nationally are expecting of them or hoping for, in terms of how they vote.”
OpenSecrets’ data includes both itemized contributions and unitemized small‑dollar donations reported through the WinRed and ActBlue platforms through July 17. The analysis focused on 17 of the 18 leading candidates in the nine Senate races that the Cook Political Report rates as competitive. The exception is Troy Jackson, who was nominated by Maine Democrats to replace Graham Platner on July 25, weeks after the campaigns filed their quarterly reports with the Federal Election Commission.
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Those candidates with established fundraising profiles combined to raise $288.8 million in individual contributions through June 30. Of that, $194 million came from out-of-state donors.
Of the eight other Democrats in those races, seven raised more money from out-of-state than they did in their states – and for four of them, that out-of-state rate was 75% or higher. Nearly 90% of the $12.7 million raised by former Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska came from the other 49 states. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who has pulled in almost $52.9 million from outside Georgia, is scheduled to headline a fundraiser on Nantucket later in August.
One explanation is the calendar: The party that dominates in a presidential election year – in 2024, the Republicans – frequently faces a backlash in the midterms two years later.
“The party that does not hold the presidency tends to be the most energized,” Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, told OpenSecrets. “That midterm gap in energy shows up in voter turnout and also in campaign contributions. This is especially true when the sitting president is unpopular, as is happening right now.”
Miller drew a parallel to 2018, the previous midterm of a Donald Trump presidency, when Democratic donors flooded races with money.
“When they’re out of power, that’s when ideological donors really get their hackles up,” Miller said. “Part of that dynamic is, angry, ideological money sometimes is a little bit less rational, and angry ideological money loves to search out what we call in political science surrogate representation. Like, ‘I’m going to purchase more representation by supporting candidates that align with my ideals out of state.’ And individual donors especially do that a lot when they’re out of power.”
But midterm energy is only part of the story. Out-of-state fundraising isn’t confined to one party. It’s shaped just as much by state size and donor capacity. The highest rate of out-of-state fundraising belongs to a Republican – nearly 93% of incumbent Susan Collins’ contributions have come from outside Maine – and three of the top four are from the GOP.
They also have something else significant in common: They’re running in states with small populations. Collins, Peltola, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and New Hampshire Republican John Sununu are all competing in states that ranked 40th or lower in population in the 2020 U.S. Census – and each raised at least 85% of their individual donations from outside those states.
Conversely, the three candidates who raised more money from in-state donors – Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) – are each running in states with top 10 populations.
As a result, it doesn’t take much for a candidate in a smaller state to max out the donor base.
“It’s not so much that candidates or campaigns want to go out of state to solicit these funds, but they often have no choice,” Panagopoulos said. “When you have candidates spending $60 [million] to $80 million in a place like Maine, you know, where’s that money going to come from? And oftentimes, they have no choice but to rely on out-of-state donors.”
Federal political campaigns are subject to contribution limits and must raise money from far more donors to counter spending by outside groups that face no such limits. As of June 30, no super PAC had a larger war chest than the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, which held nearly $239 million in cash on hand – nearly twice as much as the $126.5 million held by the Democrats’ Senate Majority Fund.
“If more of the total campaign resources are coming through super PACs and 501(c)s, and less from individual donors on the Republican side, that would mechanically make Republicans a little bit less out-of-state reliant,” Miller said. “Whereas Democrats are a little bit more of an individual donor finance system than the Republican side. And Democrats have this long history of having great swaths of ideological donors that zoom into races all around the country.”
Controlling the Senate ‘really what the goal is’
Another key reason national money is flowing into these races is straightforward: Donors believe these contests are winnable. When control of the Senate hinges on a handful of states, national spenders aren’t investing in races they’re certain to lose – especially when the choices made by those voters carry massive implications for the balance of the chamber.
In Alaska and New Hampshire, national donors make up more than 80% of the combined individual contributions for the remaining candidates. And in Iowa and Michigan, well over half of the individual contributions received by both candidates came from out of state – underscoring how heavily outside money flows into states viewed as decisive for Senate control.
“These campaigns have no choice but to go to other states, particularly wealthier states with larger numbers, or wealthy donors who can contribute to advance not necessarily an individual candidate’s goals, but to try to achieve, say, a congressional majority,” Panagopoulos said. “That’s really what the goal is – not to get any specific Senate candidate elected or defeated, per se, but to work to advance a national agenda in terms of majority status or a composition of a chamber.”
That dynamic leaves the candidates walking a fine line – appealing to the voters they hope to represent while also responding to the national donors fueling their campaigns. Miller pointed to two strategies a candidate might employ. One approach, he said, is to raise money out of state and spend it persuading local constituents to support them.
“The competing notion is that all of those campaign rhetoric, all of the campaign communications are fully transparent and it bleeds across these lines,” he continued. “And so, the topics that are brought up, the issues that are engaged, even within the campaign communications, are geared towards that national donor class instead of appealing to the constituents themselves.”
The key variable, Miller said, is how competitive the race is projected to be. He expects candidates who are heavy favorites to “be doing a little bit more appealing nationally than locally.” Conversely, those in tighter races “might get a little bit more concerned about differences between local preferences [and] national preferences.
“But the reality is,” he continued, “a lot of times, they really are the same.”
That national money also comes with risk – an opponent could weaponize it.
“The impact … often comes down to what a candidate’s opposition makes of it,” Panagopoulos said. “If they make it an issue in this race, and they can convince voters that politicians’ loyalty will be beholden to those donors over their local constituencies because of the degree of the out-of-state contributions in those races, then that has the potential to put candidates on the defensive and potentially to hurt them.”
OpenSecrets reached out to campaigns across these battleground races with specific questions about their fundraising strategies. None provided an on‑the‑record response from a spokesperson identifiable by name, and none directly addressed those questions. Instead, campaigns touted favorable statistics about their own candidates or attacked their opponents, without engaging with the broader nationalization trend.
‘No end in sight’ to nationalization trend
The trend has grown only more pronounced over recent election cycles – and scholars say there is no sign it is slowing.
“We don’t see anything on the horizon that suggests the ship is turning,” Miller said.
The trend reached historic levels in 2024, with an OpenSecrets analysis finding that Senate candidates most reliant on national dollars more frequently winning their races while those with the highest percentage of in-state dollars raised were overwhelmingly more likely to lose. The trend was most apparent in smaller states – mirroring and reinforcing the pattern observed in the current cycle.
“I think it’s in full force and there’s no end in sight,” Panagopoulos said.
One reason, Grumbach said, is the internet. The online ActBlue and WinRed platforms enable prospective donors to give to any candidate with a few mouse clicks. And the drop in ad revenue for newspapers as a result of advertising shifting to the internet led to less news coverage of local issues. That created an information vacuum filled by nationally focused political media, fueling both intense interest from activists more likely to donate and “this kind of national tug-of-war between the red and blue teams,” he said.
Panagopoulos pointed to two other reasons that work in harmony: A relatively small number of competitive races in states and districts that could tilt the balance of power, and a tight margin between the parties in both chambers – particularly the Senate, where the outcomes of only a few races can flip the GOP’s current 53-47 advantage.
“I think the only time we can expect this nationalization and this intensification of national effort to slow down is if there were a larger number of places with competitive races and a situation in which the congressional majority were not so evenly divided between the two major parties,” he said. “Now, with razor-thin margins for Republicans in both chambers of Congress and such a small number of places that can influence what happens in November, all of the attention and all of the focus nationally is on those places – and they’re getting attention from prospective donors all over the country.”
