MoneyTalks.Vote follows campaign fundraising and the flow of money into the 2026 federal elections, using live data from the Federal Election Commission. The goal is to make it easy to see who is financing the candidates on your ballot, measured to the dollar and drawn entirely from the public record. Select a state and a race, and you can compare how much each candidate has raised, how much they have spent, and how much cash they retain. This page explains exactly what the platform covers, how to read each figure, and the boundaries of what campaign finance disclosure can and cannot show.
MoneyTalks.Vote tracks the financial activity of candidates running for two types of federal office in the 2026 cycle:
These two offices share a common disclosure framework. Every Senate and House campaign must register a principal campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission and report its finances on a recurring schedule, which is what makes a consistent, comparable view of the field possible.
Coverage spans fifteen battleground states, organized into two tiers according to how competitive the 2026 races are expected to be. The tiers describe the anticipated closeness of the contests and are not forecasts of any outcome.
Top tier, the most closely contested battlegrounds, where both major parties are investing most heavily: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Second tier, additional competitive states worth watching closely: Texas, Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, Alaska, New Hampshire, Nebraska, and Virginia.
This concentration on competitive states reflects where the financial activity of an election cycle tends to be most intense. Closely divided races attract the largest fundraising hauls, the heaviest candidate spending, and the most engagement from party committees and outside groups, which makes them the contests where following the money is most revealing.
For each candidate, the platform surfaces the core figures from their Federal Election Commission filings. Understanding what each term means is the key to reading the data accurately:
Campaign finance figures are not updated continuously by the campaigns themselves; they are reported on a defined schedule set by federal law. Committees generally file on a quarterly basis during an election year, with additional reports required in the weeks before a primary and before the general election. Each report covers activity through a specific closing date, known as the coverage date. For this reason, every candidate view on MoneyTalks.Vote reflects the period through which that candidate's most recent report was filed. When you compare two candidates, it is worth noting their respective filing dates, since a more recent filing will naturally capture more activity than an older one.
All figures displayed on MoneyTalks.Vote are retrieved from the Federal Election Commission's public data interface. This information is official public record, compiled from the reports that candidates are legally required to submit. The platform does not store, alter, or resell the underlying data; it retrieves the latest available figures each time a page is loaded and presents them in a readable form. Users who wish to examine a filing in full can trace any figure back to its source at the Commission.
To use the platform well, it helps to understand its boundaries. MoneyTalks.Vote focuses on the federal Senate and House races in the covered battleground states; it does not track presidential fundraising, state or local offices, ballot measures, or party committee finances as standalone views. It reflects the money raised and spent by the candidates' own committees, which means it does not, by itself, present every dollar of independent expenditure made by outside groups in support of or opposition to a candidate. It also cannot show spending by organizations that are not required to disclose their donors, sometimes referred to as undisclosed or dark money. These limitations are inherent to the disclosure system, not to the platform, and our Learn guides explain them in greater depth.
Where the filings indicate it, the platform reflects whether a candidate is an incumbent, meaning a current officeholder seeking reelection, or a challenger seeking to unseat one. This distinction carries financial weight. Incumbents typically enjoy structural fundraising advantages, including established donor networks and greater access to political action committee contributions, while challengers often must demonstrate viability before institutional money arrives. Open seats, where no incumbent is running, tend to draw crowded fields and intense fundraising from both parties, since neither side begins with the advantage of incumbency. Reading the figures with these dynamics in mind helps explain why two candidates in the same race may show very different funding profiles.
Campaign finance data measures resources, not results. A larger war chest expands a campaign's capacity to advertise, organize, and compete, but fundraising is one factor among many that shape an election, alongside candidate quality, district composition, national conditions, and voter turnout. The figures on this platform are most useful when read as one input into a broader understanding of a race, rather than as a prediction of its outcome. Our Learn guides offer additional context on how money functions within the wider electoral system.
MoneyTalks.Vote does not take sides. There are no endorsements and no opinions, and candidates of every party are presented with identical data fields and formatting. The platform reports the numbers as filed and leaves their interpretation to you.
The numbers update automatically every time you load the page. We pull directly from the Federal Election Commission, so whatever you see reflects the most recent filings on record.