Money will pour into congressional races between now and Election Day, much of it from wealthy donors and Super PACs. The concentration of political money in so few hands raises concerns about political equality, undue influence, and corruption. Yet the 2026 elections also showcase a very different development. There are an enormous number of donations coming from people giving $200 or less.  As far back as June, Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff each had already raised close to $40 million from small donors. The final totals of either may set records by Election Day. That would seem to be good news for democracy. But research suggests a more complicated story.

The fact that candidates can depend heavily on small donors rather than wealthy contributors should be reassuring. But small-donor democracy is not an unqualified good, as Zachary Albert and I explain in our book, Small Donors in US Politics: Myth and Reality. Our findings are rooted in long-standing observations of political scientists about the characteristics and motivations of those who participate in politics. Diving into records from donor platforms like ActBlue, WinRed and many other sources, here is what we learned:

First, small donors are not a representative cross-section of ordinary Americans. They are disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, and better educated.  More importantly, they are at least as partisan and ideologically polarized as large donors, in some ways more so.  When a politician gets the bulk of their funds from small donors and declares they are financed by “ordinary Americans,” the claim is misleading.  This reflects a broader reality of democratic politics: participation is rarely representative, even when the barrier to participating is quite low.

A second finding is that small donations flow disproportionately toward prominent, nationalized contests, among candidates who generate partisan enthusiasm. Small donors often respond to conflict, celebrity, outrage, and high-profile partisan battles—the very features of contemporary politics that digital fundraising is exceptionally good at monetizing. In the 2022 midterms, the leading recipients of small donations included Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Much of this money went to candidates in safe seats (like these three) or already well-funded races. Meanwhile, lower-profile federal and state races attracted far less attention, even where funds could make an even bigger difference.

Third and finally, we find that those who benefit from small donors appear no better at representing their constituents or being effective legislators. Reforms promoting small donors often promise more representative politicians, greater responsiveness to ordinary constituents, and better governing. We found little evidence of such benefits. In roll-call voting, Members were more congruent with the policy preferences of their donors—small and large—than with constituent preferences in their districts. And officeholders who got the bulk of their funds from small donors were no more effective at passing legislation than those relying on large donors.

The Larger Problem Is Unmediated Money

Taken together, these findings point to a problem larger than small donors themselves. American campaign finance has become increasingly unmediated. Digital fundraising allows individual candidates to appeal directly to ideologically intense national audiences, while Super PACs give wealthy donors their own vehicle for spending enormous sums. In both cases, money increasingly bypasses organizations with incentives to aggregate interests and build broader electoral coalitions.

The older campaign-finance system had serious democratic deficiencies, but money more often flowed through parties, unions, membership groups, and traditional PACs. Those organizations had incentives to aggregate interests and think about coalitions. The small-donor revolution is part of a larger disintermediation and fragmentation of American politics, in which individual politicians increasingly build their own constituencies, fundraising networks, and media brands.

This fall, watch where small-donor money flows.  Some will pour into genuinely competitive Senate contests that could determine control of the chamber. But some partisan celebrities will raise extraordinary sums even in races where another dollar does little to improve their chances, while less visible House candidates may struggle for resources. Parties have stronger incentives to allocate money strategically across races because their goal is to build governing majorities. Individual donors understandably have no such obligation. The result can be a collective-action problem: a system very good at generating political participation can be surprisingly poor at directing resources where they might be most useful.    

None of this means that small donors are bad for democracy or that we should be satisfied with a system dominated by wealthy donors. It does mean that reformers should be cautious about simply subsidizing more small-dollar giving. Reforms should instead encourage a more pluralistic politics, which connects citizen participation to institutions capable of aggregating interests and building broader coalitions. That means strengthening political parties, representative membership organizations, and other intermediaries — not simply empowering individual donors and candidates. Public matching systems can also favor donations from within a candidate’s district or state, giving candidates stronger incentives to cultivate local rather than polarized, national constituencies.

The question for democratic reform is not just how to get more citizens to finance elections. It is how to organize that participation so that it is more representative and strengthens rather than bypasses the institutions needed to build coalitions, select candidates, and govern.