In Part 1 of my 2026 Dem Blue26.org Fundraising Project analysis, I covered the top line fundraising numbers and a deeper dive into how that broke out for U.S. Senate races, state Supreme Court races, Governor/Lt. Governors, Attorneys General/Secretaries of State, Other State Executives and Education Officials.
In Part 2 I'm covering State Parties before tackling the bigger fish: U.S. HOUSE candidates and STATE LEGISLATIVE races.
STATE PARTIES:
This one is pretty straightforward: I raised about $109,000 for all 50 state Democratic Parties, averaging around $2,200 apiece, although it's more like $2,800 apiece if you only include the 39 states where I raised more than $100. I raised an average of $12,000 apiece for each of the 7 Swing States, however.
STATE LEGISLATIVE RACES:
OK, I'm formatting this one a bit differently since there's simply too many state legislative districts. Instead of listing every one of the more than 2,500 (!!!) candidates I raised money for this cycle, I'm breaking out the average funds raised per candidate in each state as well as the minimum number of legislative seats flipped in each state (House + Senate combined) according to The Downballot.
It's important to keep in mind that just as there are 2 U.S. Senate races and perhaps 20 U.S. House races which haven't been called yet, there's likely dozens of state legislative races whose outcomes still haven't been determined as of this writing, so the net 612 flipped seat total at the bottom of the table below will likely increase somewhat more over the next week or so!
(Note: The Downballot notes that there's perhaps a dozen or so of these which actually switched from GOP to Indy or from Indy to Dem; for my purposes I'm simplifying it & counting those as Dem flips).
It's also worth noting that Democrats have gained control of 13 (possibly 14) legislative chambers nationally (remember, they flipped the Virginia Assembly last year)...while also gaining 8 new trifectas (again, this includes Virginia in 2025)! The Alaska chamber/trifecta changes are actually due to a coalition of Democrats, Independents and left-leaning Republicans (!!!) and won't be official unless Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins actually does officially win, which seems to be close at hand as of this writing.
In any event, nationally I raised over $809,000 for 2,558 state legislative Democratic candidates over the past 2. years, averaging $316 apiece.
U.S. HOUSE RACES:
Finally, let's take a look at the 435 U.S. House districts. For these, I've sorted & broken them out by the final competitiveness ratings according to Cook Political Report.
It's important to stress that these are the final ratings because Cook made a lot of rating changes in the final few weeks of the election cycle, which is why you'll see a lot of money raised for candidates who are ranked as "Likely/Solid Dem" (dark blue) in the tables below; many of these candidates began the cycle as "Tossups" or "Lean Dem" before being upgraded more recently.
In addition, there are several districts listed as "Likely/Solid Dem" which were actually Democratic flips; this is mainly due to fallout from the Redistricting Wars.
TOSSUP RACES: 18 Districts
Democrats swept all 18 of these, including flipping 14 GOP-held seats. Average funds raised: ~$4,700 apiece.
LEAN DEM RACES: 18 Districts
Democrats swept all 18 of these as well, including flipping 13 more GOP-held seats. Average funds raised: ~$6,600 apiece.
LEAN GOP RACES: 17 Districts
Here's where things start getting fuzzier: Democrats won at least 7 of these while losing at least 2 of them. According to the AP seat tracker, the remaining 8 seats haven't been called yet; Democrats are currently leading in 3 seats and trailing in 5...including one potential Republican flip (ME-02).
Average funds raised: ~$2,500 apiece.
LIKELY GOP RACES: 20 Districts
Surprise, surprise!! Democrats have only won 6 of these so far while losing at least 10 of them...but 5 of those wins are flips, and they still have a chance at flipping up to 4 more of the uncalled races! Unfortunately Dems also lost one seat here due to GOP gerry mandering (TN-09).
I raised around $730 apiece for 19 these candidates...note that there's one candidate I deliberately didn't include on the fundraising page, for which those who have followed me on this site or Bluesky may remember there's a very good reason...
SOLID GOP RACES: 158 Districts
Needless to say, Democrats lost nearly all of these races in deep red districts...but they've actually managed to flip at least one of them blue (NC-06) and have a very good shot at flipping up to 6 more of them! At the same time, Republicans flipped one more seat in Texas (TX-32).
There's several districts in this category which I didn't raise money for. Most of these are in Louisiana, where due to their weird Election Day Jungle Primary, I didn't even know for sure who the "Democratic nominee" would end up being. There's also CA-40, where their top-two primary last summer resulted in Democrats being shut out completely. Brian Miller (MT-02) and Heli Prilliman (TX-12) didn't use ActBlue for their fundraising platform, meaning I was unable to raise money for them.
Finally, there's John Vincent (SC-07), who I actually did raise $629.54 for, but I must have mis-entered his tally into one of the other candidates somewhere along the way.
That leaves 151 candidates who I raised money for, averaging around $444 apiece.
LIKELY/SOLID DEM RACES: 204 Districts
Again, while it may seem surprising to see 5 flipped seats in this table, that's mostly due to the Redistricting Wars in California and Utah, along with Republicans collapsing in NE-02 with the retirement of Don Bacon.
I raised money for Democrats in 39 of these districts; again, this is due to all of them starting out being ranked as Lean Dem, Tossups or even Lean GOP in a few cases. On average, I raised nearly $1,900 apiece for them.
OTHER/MISCELLANEOUS: 22 Candidates
Similar to my U.S. Senate table in Part 1, I've separated out the House candidates who either dropped out early, lost their primary, switched races (see: Mary Peltola & Chris Pappas) or weren't even running this year (legacy monthly recurring donations from an earlier election cycle). I'm including these for completeness: Nearly $35,000 went to them.
So, there you have it: Over $2.1 million raised for over 3,300 Democratic candidates, broken out to the penny!
Remember, if you found this project to be useful and want to support my efforts for the 2028 Presidential election cycle, you can throw a tip my way here, thank you!
BONUS ANNOUNCEMENT!
Speaking of the next election cycle...
I hinted in a recent post on Bluesky that I'd also have a special announcement to make regarding an important online fundraising development, so here it is:
Going forward, anyone who donates to candidates via any of my pages will NO LONGER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT ACTBLUE SHARING THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES OR PHONE NUMBERS w/THE CAMPAIGNS OR PARTY COMMITTEES...WITHOUT EVEN HAVING TO OPT OUT!
Perhaps the biggest single complaint all of us have about modern campaign fundraising is the endless deluge of spam emails & text messages from dozens of political campaigns begging us to donate to them. In most cases, not only did we never knowingly sign up for their mailing lists, we often had never even heard of that particular candidate before! It's been a growing problem for years which reached critical mass during the 2026 election cycle.
In spite of what many people think, ActBlue is not the one selling your contact data to third party organizations or campaigns which you didn't actually donate to. In many cases it's the campaigns themselves who are doing so. Remember, ActBlue is legally required by campaign finance law to provide SOME of your contact info to the campaigns which in turn have to provide that to the FEC (or state campaign finance agencies), such as your name, mailing address, employer and the like.
In addition, as I've written about several times before, the reality is that it's absurdly easy for 3rd-party "data brokers" to scrape the internet and match up your email and/or phone number with fundraising/donation data. Yes, it's officially illegal to use FEC data in this way (and I'm guessing most state-level campaign finance laws have similar prohibitions), but that doesn't stop some unscrupulous actors from doing so anyway.
Even without actual FEC data, it's still easy for these companies to put together your publicly available email/phone numbers with other data to model whether you're a likely donor, and voila: You're on a dozen lists.
Having said that, ActBlue is not legally required to forward your email or phone number to the campaigns, and the fact that they have a policy of doing so by default has been a major gripe of mine with them for years.
UNTIL NOW, there has been a partial workaround for this: ActBlue has long included a tool in the administration settings for every "tandem" (ie, slate) page which, when enabled, causes a popup window to appear during the checkout process that looks like so:
By default, when a donor gives on a Tandem form, their contact information is shared with every recipient on the form. If you are the managing entity on a Tandem form and you want to change this default setting so that donors are asked after they give whether they want to share their contact information with the other recipients on the Tandem form, change this setting to “ Yes.” This will show donors a pop-up box after they've donated that asks them to opt-in to share their information.
On the one hand, this is somewhat helpful, as it lets me give those who donate via my pages the ability to opt out of sharing their email/phone numbers with the campaigns.
On the other hand, this still has several problems:
- It isn't enabled by default
- When it is enabled, the default setting is to share their info; you have to actively select "Not now"
- It doesn't show up until the checkout process, after they've already committed to making a donation
- It likely confuses a lot of donors due to the cryptic phrasing
- If they have a popup blocker enabled on their web browser it will never appear at all
Back in early September, ActBlue reached out to me to join their product development team on a Zoom call so they could get some feedback from me about the types of changes & improvements I'd like to see made to their platform. The very first item on my list was for them to address the problem of them sharing donor email/phone number data with the campaigns, party committees and other PACs/organizations by default.
To be clear: I'm sure I'm not the only one who does what I do who was pushing them to address this; they were receiving similar advice from others as well.
What I had in mind was for them to add something like this to the main donor options, with the radio button defaulting to "no:"
I didn't hear back on this for awhile, which made sense since we were rapidly approaching the final stretch of the midterm election season. I figured that they would either shrug the recommendations of myself and others off...or that any changes wouldn't be announced until after the dust had settled on the 2026 midterms.
AND THEN, SURE ENOUGH, YESTERDAY, ACTBLUE CONTACTED ME TO INFORM ME OF AN INCREDIBLY WELCOME NEW POLICY CHANGE!
Well, they didn't add the radio button tool to the main page for the donor that I suggested, but what they did do is just as good!
Check out what the administrative tool looks like for this feature now:
I wrote back just to double-check what this means, and ActBlue support confirmed it officially:
"That's right! the NO setting for this feature on any page now means that donor email/phone numbers WILL NOT BE SHARED with the recipients listed on that page."
No more popups needed. No more opting out needed.
This is HUGE!
Now, there's two important caveats here:
- First: This feature is not enabled on all fundraising pages by default; the page administrator has to change the admin settings and select "No" for it to take effect.
- Second: This feature is only available on tandem pages--that is, slate pages, aka pages which include more than one recipient. Since most ActBlue pages only raise money for a single recipient (these are the ones used on most Dem campaign websites, for instance), this is not a blanket change to every ActBlue page on the web.
It is, however, an across the board policy for MY slate pages; Every one of them is set up to NOT share your email or phone number with the recipients going forward!
November 2028 is already coming up on us...