When Political Money Dwarfs the Charities Holding America Together
Let’s start with a number: $14.4 billion.
That is a conservative estimate of the total political money raised and spent across both major parties in the 2020 election cycle alone candidate committees, national party committees, super PACs, and dark money groups combined. It is not a misprint. It is not an exaggeration. It is the documented, Federal Election Commission-verified cost of choosing a president, 435 House members, and 33 senators that year.
Now consider a second number: 36%.
That is the share of American nonprofits that ended 2024 operating at a deficit the highest figure recorded in a decade of tracking by the Nonprofit Finance Fund. More than half of those organizations had three months or less of cash on hand. Nearly one in five had a single month’s cushion between their mission and their closure.
Hold both numbers in your head at the same time. Then ask yourself: have we, as a country, gotten our priorities exactly backwards?
The Chart No One Wants to Talk About
Over the past two decades, we at I Vote My Vote have tracked the money that flows into American elections. The chart is staggering even to those of us who watch it every cycle.
In 2006, both parties combined to raise roughly $3.5 billion across all money categories — candidate campaigns, national party committees, and the traditional PACs of that pre-Citizens United era. That number felt enormous at the time. It was.
Then came January 2010, and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling. Within two election cycles, the floodgates were open. By 2012, conservative super PACs alone accounted for an estimated $550 million in outside spending. By 2016, the combined party and outside money ecosystem approached $6 billion. By 2020, with the pandemic raging and millions of Americans out of work, the political money machine shattered every record in existence, pushing past $14 billion when all streams are counted.
The 2024 cycle was no different. The six national party committees — the DNC, DSCC, DCCC, RNC, NRSC, and NRCC — collectively raised more than $2.3 billion. Super PACs reported receipts exceeding $5 billion. Total outside spending hit a record $4.5 billion, with more than half of that coming from groups that, as OpenSecrets documented, “do not fully disclose the source of their funding.” In a single election cycle, political dark money groups funneled an estimated $250 million from anonymous donors into affiliated super PACs — money whose ultimate origin may never be known.
All of that to elect people who, in many cases, were going to win anyway.
What That Money Could Have Done Instead
Americans are generous people. In 2024, individuals, foundations, corporations, and bequests gave a combined $592.5 billion to charitable causes — a record in current dollars, according to Giving USA’s most comprehensive annual report on American philanthropy. We are, by most measures, the most charitable nation on earth.
But here is what that generosity is up against.
The nonprofit sector employs roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. private workforce. It runs the food banks, the domestic violence shelters, the mental health clinics, the after-school programs, the addiction recovery centers, the hospice facilities, the job training programs, and the community health centers that government doesn’t reach and the market doesn’t serve. These are not luxury organizations. They are, for tens of millions of Americans, the last line of defense between hardship and catastrophe.
And they are running on fumes.
The Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2025 survey of more than 2,200 organizations found that 85% expect service demand to increase this year — at the very same moment that 84% of those receiving government funding anticipate cuts to that support. A Forvis Mazars study found that nearly half of all nonprofits lack sufficient funding to deliver their programs and services at full capacity. The Urban Institute has documented a widening gap between what communities need and what nonprofits can provide — a gap that government funding disruptions have widened further, with one in three service-providing charities losing federal support in the first half of 2025 alone.
One California human services nonprofit described their situation to NFF researchers in language that should stop any donor cold: “Our Board has officially requested a plan for a 30 percent cut to personnel and services, which is not cutting fat — it’s muscle and bone.”
The Proportion Problem
Here is the question we believe every American voter and donor deserves to confront directly.
In the 2020 presidential cycle, the political money ecosystem absorbed more than $14 billion. According to Feeding America, it costs roughly $1.74 to provide a meal through its food bank network. Fourteen billion dollars could have provided more than eight billion meals — enough to eliminate food insecurity in the United States for an entire year, with billions left over.
In the 2024 cycle, super PACs alone raised more than $5 billion. The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates the unmet need for mental health services in the United States exceeds $280 billion annually — dwarfing even the most ambitious political spending. But $5 billion redirected to community mental health centers would still have funded services for millions of Americans who currently receive none.
The Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans — raised $72 million in a single quarter of 2026. The Senate Majority PAC, its Democratic counterpart, raised $56 million in the same period. That $128 million, in ninety days, for the purpose of influencing a handful of Senate races, is more than the combined annual budget of many of the nation’s largest food banks.
We are not suggesting that elections don’t matter. They do — profoundly. The winners of these races make decisions that affect every American and every nonprofit in the country. The stakes of electoral politics are real, and civic participation is a core value at I Vote My Vote.
But we are suggesting that the scale of political spending has become so disconnected from any rational relationship between cost and civic outcome that it demands examination. When a single billionaire can write a $165 million check to a super PAC in a single election cycle — as Timothy Mellon did in 2024 — and that is considered a normal and legal exercise of political speech, something has gone fundamentally wrong with the allocation of American resources.
The Donors Who Are Doing Both and Why It Matters
To be fair: the same wealthy individuals who fuel political spending also drive enormous philanthropic activity. The Giving USA data shows that just fifty megadonors gave $16.2 billion to charitable causes in 2024 — more than a third higher than the previous year. Some of the nation’s largest foundations, funded by the same fortunes that flow into political action committees, do extraordinary work.
But there is a critical structural difference. Charitable giving to a food bank feeds people this week. Charitable giving to a housing nonprofit shelters a family this month. Charitable giving to a mental health clinic sees a patient in crisis this year. Political spending, even when it succeeds in electing the “right” candidate, operates on a timeline of years — and is subject to the vagaries of governance, opposition, and institutional inertia that make even the most well-intentioned electoral victory a slow, uncertain path to change.
Meanwhile, the real-world cost of the political money arms race falls hardest on the organizations trying to fill the gaps that politics has failed to close for decades.
There is also the troubling structural shift that Giving USA has flagged: the proportion of American households that actually give to charity has fallen from roughly two-thirds to roughly half over the past twenty years. Fewer Americans are giving. The dollars that are flowing are increasingly concentrated among the wealthy. And donor-advised funds — which allow donors to take an immediate tax deduction while sitting on the money before distributing it to working charities — are growing faster than actual grants to nonprofits by a ratio of two to one.
The political money machine, by contrast, has no such donor fatigue problem. Every two years, like clockwork, billions pour in.
A Question of Values
We believe in elections. We believe every vote counts and that civic engagement is the foundation of a functioning democracy. That is, after all, why we built I Vote My Vote.
But we also believe that a democracy expresses its values not only in how its people vote, but in how they spend. And the data assembled in our recent series on campaign finance — covering every election cycle from 2006 through 2024 — raises a question that we think belongs in every conversation about political participation:
What are we actually buying?
From 2006 to 2024, the two major parties and their allied outside groups spent a combined estimated $80 billion or more on federal elections. That money was spent on television ads, direct mail, digital targeting, opposition research, legal fees, private jets, polling firms, campaign consultants, and the colossal infrastructure of modern partisan warfare. A portion of it, yes, went to genuine voter education and mobilization. Much of it went to tearing down the other side.
Thirty-six percent of the nonprofits serving your neighbors ended last year in deficit. Fifty-two percent had less than three months of cash in reserve. Eighty-five percent expect demand for their services to grow this year, while their funding contracts.
The people writing $100 million checks to super PACs are making a choice. So, implicitly, are the rest of us — every time we accept the current structure of American campaign finance as an inevitable feature of democratic life rather than a policy decision that can be revisited, reformed, or replaced.
What You Can Do
At I Vote My Vote, we don’t tell you how to vote. But we do believe in informed civic engagement — and that includes engagement with how political money works, where it goes, and what it crowds out.
Stay informed. Follow campaign finance data at OpenSecrets.org and the Federal Election Commission’s public database. Know who is funding the ads you see.
Give to the gaps. If you have the capacity to donate, consider the nonprofit organizations in your community that are stretching every dollar to serve real people in real need — right now, not after the next election.
Support reform. Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision, but it is not a law of nature. Legislative and constitutional responses are actively being debated. The DISCLOSE Act, the For the People Act, and state-level clean elections initiatives are part of that conversation. Know where your candidates stand.
Ask better questions. The next time you see a political ad — and you will see thousands before November — ask yourself: who paid for this? What else could that money have done? And what does the answer tell you about the priorities of the people asking for your vote?
Democracy is worth funding. So is the country it’s supposed to govern.
I Vote My Vote is a nonpartisan civic engagement platform dedicated to voter education and transparent coverage of U.S. elections. We do not endorse candidates or parties. Campaign finance data in this article is drawn from Federal Election Commission statistical summaries, OpenSecrets, Ballotpedia, and Giving USA’s Annual Report on Philanthropy. Nonprofit sector data is sourced from the Nonprofit Finance Fund 2025 Survey, the Urban Institute’s National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts, and Forvis Mazars.
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