$1 Billion in Dark Money Is Flooding the 2026 Midterms
NEWS & RESEARCH
At least $1 billion of the spending in the 2026 midterm elections is dark money: untraceable funds provided by anonymous donors, according to the New York Times. Given the opaque nature of these contributions, the real figure is almost certainly higher, and most of it comes from billionaires, corporations and special interests hoping to shape who wins. In Michigan and Minnesota, for example, tens of millions of untraceable dollars poured into Senate primaries in an effort to topple progressive Democratic candidates. And while dark money is not new, its reach certainly is, as the NYT reports that "nearly every major primary and battleground race this fall has been or will be shaped by secret funds." The senior director of the Brennan Center's Elections and Government Program agrees, saying, "We are on track to have the least transparent midterm at least since Citizens United," referencing the 2010 Supreme Court decision that gave rise to super PACs. The anonymously sourced expenditures are so large that in some races they outstrip the spending of the campaigns themselves, making candidates seem like bystanders in their own elections—a pattern especially pronounced in primaries.
SOURCES: New York Times | CBS News | US News | Brennan Center for Justice
ANALYSIS & OPINION
As unknown entities pour funds into federal elections, the legal loopholes they use to obscure their identities have grown more sophisticated, producing what CBS News calls "a tangled spending dynamic [that] reflects an increasingly secretive web of money built to covertly distribute money from billionaire donors." The complexity is the point: the harder the money is to trace, the less anyone can say who is giving to whom. And according to the chief executive of Issue One, a group that has sought to reduce the role of money in politics, the sums are "enough money to manipulate a lot of politicians and to put a lot of poison in the blood of the American political system." The research director at Public Citizen adds, "When corporate money can inundate the political discourse, there's less room for talk about what people really care about. Instead, you have the situation that we have in Congress now where they are spending an inordinate amount of time discussing the niche regulatory policy problems related to crypto while people really just want cheaper groceries." And voters bear the cost, as they are left, in the words of the chief investigator at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, "without the ability to know who is spending significant sums to benefit—and potentially influence—elected officials." None of this corrects itself. Every cycle Congress does not act, the structures grow more elaborate and the people who built them get better at using them.
SOURCES: New York Times | CBS News | US News
HOW TO FIX IT
Federal action:
There are three main ways that dark money enters the political arena. First, political operations hide behind nonprofits, which are not legally required to disclose their contributors. These groups run ads that are technically about policy, but often attack or praise sitting members of Congress in terms the average voter cannot distinguish from an ordinary campaign commercial. Second, nonprofits that fall under IRS Code Section 501(c)4) may donate to super PACs. A super PAC must name all of its donors—including the nonprofit—but it does not have to name the nonprofit's donors, who therefore stay anonymous. Third are the so-called "pop-up" PACs. The final deadline for a committee to name its donors falls three weeks before Election Day, so a group that forms after that date can spend freely through the closing stretch of a race and reveal who paid for it only once the votes are already cast, when the information can no longer affect voters’ decisions.
Pass the SHINE Act—the Stopping Hidden Interests and Non-Disclosure in Elections Act—which would require political action committees to report any contribution of $1,000 or more received in the final 20 days before an election within 48 hours of receiving it. This would close the gap that allows groups to “pop up” at the last minute and spend freely in the final days of a race.
Reintroduce and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would tie disclosure to what a group does rather than what it is. Any organization that spends more than $10,000 to influence a federal election—a nonprofit included—would have to report it to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) within 24 hours and name everyone who gave that organization $10,000 or more during the cycle. Money handed to a group for elections would count as election spending too, closing the loophole that lets a nonprofit pass millions to an allied super PAC while keeping the original funders hidden.
Additionally, any corporation or limited liability company that crosses the threshold would also have to name the real people who own and control it, which would reach shell companies that exist only as a registration and a mailing address.
The bill would also address the FEC’s deadlock. The Freedom to Vote Act says that the FEC’s general counsel would decide whether to open an investigation regarding dark money, and that decision would stand unless a majority of commissioners voted to overrule it within 30 days. A tie would no longer be a veto.
Pass legislation putting Federal Election Commission nominations on a clock. The FEC currently can't use its authority for another reason: it has lacked a quorum since 2025 and has only two of its five seats filled, below the four commissioners needed to act. The vacancies are not a scheduling accident—leaving seats empty switches off enforcement without having to repeal a single law. Congress can pass a bill stating that if a president fails to nominate within a fixed window after a seat opens, a nominee recommended by congressional leaders would advance automatically to a Senate floor vote. This would push the president to pick someone, since the alternative would be a commissioner he did not choose.
Strike the "dark money rider" from the annual appropriations bill. The FEC is not the only agency sidelined. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) decides whether a 501(c)(4) nonprofit—the legal form nearly all of these groups take—is genuinely a "social welfare" organization or a political operation wearing one as a costume. But for roughly a decade, Congress has renewed a provision in its yearly spending bill that bars the IRS from issuing, revising or finalizing any guidance defining that standard, and the Campaign Legal Center reports it cannot find a single recent case of a nonprofit losing its tax-exempt status over political activity. Deleting that paragraph from the next spending bill would let the agency draw the line again.
Candidates can also sign a People's Pledge. In the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race, Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren agreed that if an outside group ran ads supporting either of them, that candidate would pay half the cost of the buy to a charity chosen by the opponent. Thus, outside spending in what should have been one of the country's most expensive races collapsed. Versions of this were also adopted in a 2013 House primary and a 2014 Rhode Island race. It requires no legislation—only two candidates who would rather run their own race. A candidate that refuses such an offer from an opponent can be tarnished as a dark money candidate.
State Action:
Adopt Arizona's Proposition 211 as a model for other states. Approved by 72% of Arizona voters in 2022, it requires any group spending more than $50,000 on a statewide race, or $25,000 on any other race, to name its major donors and, beyond them, anyone who contributed more than $2,500 of the original money behind those donations—tracing each contribution back to the personal or business income it came from. It therefore closes a loophole by following the money through the intermediaries rather than stopping at whoever wrote the last check. It has already survived a constitutional challenge in court.
Pass laws like Michigan's Money Out of Politics proposal, which would require groups paying for policy ads—the ones that attack or praise a sitting member of Congress without formally telling voters how to vote—to name their donors whenever the ads run within 100 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary. It would also bar regulated utilities and companies holding state contracts worth more than $250,000 from spending on Michigan elections at all.
Pass laws like California’s DISCLOSE Act to require political ads to name their top funders on the ads themselves. A PAC's name is not regulated and carries no information: In the 2026 cycle, groups adopted astroturf names like Lead Left PAC and Progressive Champions PAC while working to elect Republicans, and an Ohio nonprofit that gave $3.1 million to a super PAC backing Sen. John Cornyn simply changed its name two weeks after the donation became public. No disclosure rule can force an honest name. California's answer is to make the name irrelevant: An ad must display the PAC's three largest funders on screen and name the original donors rather than the pass-through when money has been earmarked and routed through another organization. Thus, a voter learns who is paying while watching the ad, not in a filing months later.
Require the sellers of political advertising to collect and publish the original source of the money. Broadcasters, online platforms and mail houses all know who paid them but are required to find out whose money it actually was. A state could make original-source attribution a condition of the sale, which would reach the groups that federal enforcement currently cannot—because a shell company cannot buy airtime without going through a vendor.
Legislation: H.R.6981 - SHINE Act of 2026 | H.R.11 - Freedom to Vote Act | H.R.7497 - Restoring Integrity to America's Elections Act | Proposition 211 - Voters' Right to Know Act (Arizona) | AB 249 - California DISCLOSE Act
