The role of superwealthy donors in influencing elections, flooding the airwaves with ads and targeting voters with digital messages, can seem overwhelming. Billionaire donors are playing a huge role in contests for the White House: some 44% of all the funds raised to back Donald Trump’s 2024 run came from 10 individual megadonors, according to OpenSecrets. And the total cost of federal elections has been rising—only the 2020 cycle was more drenched in spending than 2024’s, when taking inflation into account.
But there are encouraging steps being taken in states and cities across the country that are helping candidates to orient their campaigns toward their constituents rather than wealthy financiers.
New York State’s experience in 2024 elections resoundingly shows a way that states, counties, and cities can offer a program to counteract the role of big money in elections, as found in a new brief from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. The institute’s study looks at the first go-around for an optional public campaign financing system in New York elections, which was offered in 2024 to state legislative candidates, and will be offered to statewide races including governor and attorney general in 2026.
Here’s how New York State’s public campaign finance program works. First, candidates must qualify for the program by raising a threshold of small donations, from $5 up to $250, from residents in their districts. After agreeing to abide by program rules, like limiting their personal spending on their runs, participating candidates are then allowed to have eligible contributions matched with public funding from a fund administered by the state’s Public Campaign Financing Board (PCFB). For New York State legislative candidates in the last cycle, donations from individuals in their districts were amplified so that the first $50 of a contribution was matched at a 12:1 ratio, the next $100 at a 9:1 ratio, and the next $100 at an 8:1 ratio—an innovative tiered formula. It was modeled on a successful matching program used widely by candidates in New York City elections for decades.
The first go-around of the voluntary program proved very popular with New York political hopefuls. More than 70% of candidates signed up for the program, totaling 328 legislative candidates, the Brennan Center reports—incumbents and challengers, Democrats and Republicans, hailing from more than three-quarters of the state’s districts.
A first major finding from New York’s debut offering of the program: Campaign financing made up of small contributions and the public matching funds they unlocked was 45% of overall funding in the 2024 cycle, whereas small contributions made up just 5% of campaign financing in prior cycles before the public funding was available. A related finding shows there is a strong indication that state candidates spent more time talking to voters in the district they were running to represent—the number of small-dollar donors who made in-district donations doubled compared with the 2020 and 2022 cycles, with around 50,800 New Yorkers making qualifying donations.
In the executive budget proposal for 2026, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul met the PCFB’s request by allocating $114.5 million for the statewide matching system, a program funding level praised by the Brennan Center. Many candidates are already signing up.
In an op-ed this month examining the New York matching-funds program’s success in encouraging small-dollar donations from residents, Celina Avalos Jaramillo and Ian Vandewalker of the Brennan Center wrote, “Candidates advertised the public match in their fundraising pitches to recruit new donors in their communities. These shifts show that the program is already meeting the goal of increasing engagement between candidates and the constituents they seek to represent, rather than a wealthy few.”
In past cycles, campaign funding in New York’s elections had been dominated by donations from private companies and PACs, according to campaign finance analysis by a nonprofit that is now part of OpenSecrets. But under the latest program, the Brennan Center found, large contributions of $1,000 or more and donations from PACs and corporations fell as a percentage of campaign funding: from 70% of candidates’ funding in 2020, to 72% in 2022, to 38% in 2024.
The program caps how much candidates can receive from the program: in 2026, it will be $3.5 million for each of the primary and general elections for New York governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, and attorney general. The awarded matching funds data is posted transparently online and subject to post-election audits by the PCFB, and participating candidates must participate in a public debate, among other requirements. The law that established the public campaign financing program also lowered New York’s very-high campaign finance limits, which previously had allowed individuals to give $69,700 per election cycle.
Candidates in 37 of New York’s 63 Senate districts received matching funds, boosting the value for their campaigns of the small donations they raised from locals. Minita Sanghvi, a candidate in the area surrounding Albany, spoke about how the program gave her the ability to focus on voters: “Instead of, you know, running after big donors, and hearing about those issues, I’m hearing from our residents on issues that matter to them… The community is fueling this, this idea of me running for Senate.”
Ahead of the election, Sludge spoke over video chat with Joanna Zdanys, deputy director in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program, in more detail about how the program was already transforming state elections by empowering small-donor driven campaigns. While big donors and out-of-state donors traditionally dominated New York campaign funding, Zdanys said, the program “rebalances that and gives candidates the opportunity to meaningfully fundraise, seeking their campaign support from the very people they’re seeking to represent.”
The path to the program’s debut was not effortless in the state capitol. Early on in 2023, there were political rumblings in Albany that the statewide matching program, which was passed into law as part of the massive New York State budget in April 2020, would be delayed, but lawmakers ultimately came to agree on an adequate funding level for the new PCFB.
Versions of public campaign financing programs are in effect in more than three dozen states, counties, and localities across the country, according to a Brennan Center resource. Once adopted, the programs often prove popular with both candidates and small-dollar political donors, participation rates show. In recent years, flavors of public campaign financing options have been studied in Los Angeles and introduced in Chicago, among other places.
Said the Brennan Center experts on the push to counteract billionaire-fueled elections: “New York’s program offers a powerful alternative that can help regular Americans reclaim our democracy and ensure that our elected officials are truly accountable to the people they seek to represent.”
