The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) launched its Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 project in spring 2026, as an interactive resource for the public, candidates, officeholders, activists, and the media.Footnote ¹ CAWP, founded in 1971 as a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is nationally recognized as the leading source of scholarly research and current data about women’s political participation in the United States. CAWP’s 2026 Women, Money, & Politics Watch provides users with real-time data about how women candidates are faring with fundraising statistics organized by candidate gender, party, and women’s racial/ethnic identities. Moreover, the project showcases the less-examined role of women as donors. This Notes from the Field offer an overview of the project including its mission and origins and describe its relationship to scholarship. CAWP’s approach to the study of money and politics is aimed at demystifying the process of donating and illuminating the fundraising landscape for the general public and political candidates, respectively.

CAWP’s Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2026 project consists of a National View page with congressional campaign finance data gathered by OpenSecrets,Footnote ² organized by state, chamber, and seat status. Drawing on CAWP’s comprehensive databases of women candidates and officeholders, including information about women’s racial/ethnic identities, users can review information about fundraising totals from individual contributors by candidate gender. Interactive data visualizations, powered by Graphicacy,Footnote ³ are designed to make the data accessible and shareable. National trends are highlighted alongside pages profiling congressional races state-by-state.

The project’s Donor Gaps page is designed to summarize the 2026 congressional money and politics landscape from the donor perspective. With interactive data visualizations, the CAWP site displays women contributors as a share of all donors and all funds contributed in the cycle, grouped by candidate demographics as well as donor race, education, and marital status. In short, users can determine both the overall participation level of women as different types of donors as well as the share of total funds they provided. Moreover, users can explore how donor demographics are related to contributing to various candidate subgroups. This page relies on data from CAWP and OpenSecrets as well as voter file data provided by Catalist.Footnote ⁴

The project had its origins in the 2018 election, a banner year for women candidates, when a record number of women sought and won offices in the wake of the 2016 presidential election (Dittmar Reference Dittmar2019). The heightened public interest in women candidates prompted Edwin Bender, then the Executive Director of the National Institute on Money in Politics (NIMP), the leading state campaign finance research organization, to invite CAWP to collaborate on a new research project. Bender suggested NIMP and CAWP collaborate to analyze the role of money in that historic year for women candidates.

For decades, CAWP had offered women candidates guidance on fundraising during its annual, bipartisan/nonpartisan campaign training called Ready-to-Run®. The fundraising session, led by experts, offers advice on putting together the resources needed for campaigns as well as how to navigate pitfalls of fundraising as women candidates. CAWP had already conducted some research on the topic, given the historic challenges that fundraising and expectations about women’s fundraising have played in women’s emergence as candidates and election to office (Dittmar Reference Dittmar2014).

With support from Pivotal and working with the talented NIMP (now OpenSecrets)Footnote ⁵ research team, CAWP published a series of reports about women candidates and women donors in state legislative and statewide executive elections.Footnote ⁶ These reports culminated in an interactive website offering in-depth analysis of women donors and the fundraising of women candidates for state offices that spanned two decades, called The Donor Gap.Footnote ⁷ While CAWP’s money and politics reports were published as downloadable PDFs, The Donor Gap represented a new approach with interactive data visualizations designed by Graphicacy, aiming for more user-friendly and mobile-friendly experiences. The website revealed the extent to which women are underrepresented as campaign contributors while also analyzing patterns in women’s fundraising and the connections between women donors and women candidates.

It was against this backdrop that CAWP’s Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 research project came to life, launching in March 2024.Footnote ⁸ Rather than waiting to analyze campaign finance data until after the election, CAWP would provide real-time data and analysis. Doing so would expand CAWP’s existing election expertise: its well-established Election Watch resourceFootnote ⁹ that tracks women candidates each cycle would be accompanied by campaign finance information. And while CAWP provides ongoing resources about women’s political participation as voters,Footnote ¹⁰ CAWP would now track women’s participation as donors. By expanding to donors, CAWP would make possible assessments of how much voice women exercise in politics via their campaign contributions.

As with all of CAWP’s research projects, CAWP’s money and politics projects have been inspired and shaped by both academic studies and practitioner experiences. For example, extensive studies of women’s fundraising—particularly of congressional elections—revealed that, controlling for other factors, women candidates usually raised similar levels of funds as men, if not more (Burrell Reference Burrell1994, Reference Burrell2014; Uhlaner and Schlozman Reference Uhlaner and Schlozman1986).Footnote ¹¹ Many years ago, Seltzer, Newman, and Leighton (Reference Seltzer, Newman and Leighton1997) analyzed campaign finance data and provided a note of caution: the misconception that women candidates can’t raise money can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since the 1970s, gender-conscious political action committees (PACs) and donor networks such as EMILY’s List have worked to overcome sexism on the part of financial gatekeepers, with considerable success—particularly for Democratic women (e.g., Crowder-Meyer and Cooperman Reference Crowder-Meyer and Cooperman2018; Malcolm and Unger Reference Malcolm and Unger2017; Thomsen and Swers Reference Thomsen and Swers2017). This activism, aimed at the early stages of candidacy, fundamentally altered how campaign contributions are mobilized by and for women in politics. And once elected, women have name recognition and networks that set them apart from first-time candidates.

At the same time, CAWP surveys and interviews of women politicians found that fundraising is often cited as a reason for women’s underrepresentation as elected officials as well as a personal challenge (Carroll and Sanbonmatsu Reference Carroll and Sanbonmatsu2013; Dittmar et al. Reference Dittmar, Sanbonmatsu and Carroll2018; Sanbonmatsu et al. Reference Sanbonmatsu, Carroll and Walsh2009). It became clear that, despite much progress since the 1970s: (a) women in politics continue to see money and politics as a challenge—particularly first-time candidates and women from historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, and (b) it is critical to analyze the data with nuance and context in order to avoid perpetuating the myth that women are unable to fundraise.

Fundraising experts who have worked for candidates from both major political parties and organizations, such as the Electing Women’s Alliance and the Women’s Public Leadership Network, shared insights and made suggestions about the contours of Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 as did the knowledgeable staff of NIMP and OpenSecrets. Building on the findings of academic researchers (e.g., Jenkins Reference Jenkins2007) and practitioners (e.g., Bryner Reference Bryner2021; RepresentWomen 2020), we decided to investigate how money is raised from individuals and we designed the website interactively to allow users to disaggregate women candidates by racial/ethnic identity. Due to inequalities in income and wealth, the ability to raise money and access donors, as well as rely on personal wealth, depends on race/ethnicity and class in addition to gender (Abrams Reference Abrams2019; James Reference James2022; Scott Reference Scott2022).

In turn, the findings from CAWP’s project can contribute to academic debates and provide useful information for candidates and organizations (Gothreau and Sanbonmatsu Reference Gothreau and Sanbonmatsu2023; Sanbonmatsu and Rogers Reference Sanbonmatsu and Rogers2020). Following the insights established by prior work, we have been especially interested in tracking the process of fundraising, and not just the total amount of funds raised. For example, CAWP’s Final Analysis of Women, Money, & Politics Watch 2024 found that women candidates—at both congressional and state levels—were usually more likely than men to raise funds from small contributions (Sanbonmatsu and Adhikari Reference Sanbonmatsu and Adhikari2025).Footnote ¹² And women were less likely to be financing their own campaigns, meaning that they are disadvantaged in that aspect of campaign support; when women are less able to tap personal wealth than men, their fundraising burden is greater. Candidate emergence may also be less likely. Meanwhile, in 2024 congressional races, women often raised more than men in the most competitive races, thereby confirming that women candidates can lead in the money race. At the same time, however, the average amount raised by U.S. Senate incumbent men was higher than the average for women.

Because our research includes the demographics of donors and patterns of donor support, we have been able to shed light on the representativeness of American democracy from a participation lens. The relationships in the data between candidate race/ethnicity and donor race/ethnicity, as well as candidate gender and donor gender, have implications for who can emerge as candidates. After all, if women—and particularly women from historically underrepresented groups—are less able to support candidates financially or fund their own campaigns, the demographics of candidates and, ultimately, officeholders, will be affected. Women do not contribute solely to women candidates, but we have found gender affinity effects throughout the project, as well as a positive relationship between donor and candidate race/ethnicity.

Throughout CAWP’s research we have noted the successes of women candidates’ fundraising, including women incumbents. But we have also identified challenges for those subgroups of women who remain disproportionately underrepresented in elected office: women from historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups as well as Republican women. The gender disparities in who can self-fund their candidacies are a recurring theme. Moreover, our research findings challenge the assumption that the proportion of total funds contributed by women donors will necessarily increase with the passage of time (Gothreau and Sanbonmatsu Reference Gothreau and Sanbonmatsu2023).

In the end, CAWP’s Women, Money, and Politics project can offer lessons for bringing research to broader audiences. By collaborating with campaign finance researchers and learning from scholars, women’s organizations, fundraising experts, and women candidates and elected officials, CAWP has been able to tap a wide array of experts and perspectives—collaborations that have also enabled a wider dissemination of knowledge. These consultations have helped us better understand women’s fundraising successes in the face of some persistent obstacles. By inviting constructive feedback and being flexible about how we conduct our research and share our findings, we have sought to meet the needs of our audiences. Finally, by making data and analysis freely available and accessible, we have worked to educate the public and facilitate political participation.