Tracking the money: The biggest donors in the 2026 US midterm elections

The 2026 US midterms are on track to be the most expensive in the country’s history. Spending on political advertising alone is projected to reach $11.6bn, more than in any previous election cycle, including the 2024 presidential race, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Much of that money comes from wealthy donors, political nonprofits and businesses seeking to shape Washington’s priorities, and some of it passes through networks of organisations before it is spent.

In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera uses Federal Election Commission data to trace the billionaires, financiers and companies behind the largest contributions ahead of the November 3 vote.

The 50 largest donors and organisations have so far contributed a combined $2.77bn during the 2026 midterm election cycle.

Republican-aligned contributors accounted for $1.67bn, or about 60 percent of donations, double the $832m (30 percent) from Democratic-aligned contributors.

The remaining $264m, about 10 percent, came from contributors classified as bipartisan or special interest, including groups backing sports betting and cryptocurrency.

Individuals can donate up to $3,500 per election to a US federal candidate’s campaign in the 2025–26 election cycle. Yet some of the people on this list have given hundreds of millions of dollars.

That is legal because most of the money went not to candidates but to super political action committees, or super PACs, which can accept donations of any size.

A super PAC is a group that can raise and spend unlimited sums to support or oppose candidates, mainly through advertising. The main condition is that it must not coordinate its spending with candidates or their campaigns.

They emerged in 2010 after two court rulings paved the way for unlimited spending on elections by groups independent of candidates.

Super PACs must report their donors to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the US agency that oversees federal elections. But some major contributors, including One Nation and Majority Forward, are nonprofit groups that do not have to disclose their own donors.

This can hide where political money originally comes from, a practice known as “dark money”.

But Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law and leadership at Harvard Law School and a campaign finance reform advocate, argues that the money is hidden only from voters.

“It’s not dark to the politicians. It’s dark to us,” he told Josh Rushing on Al Jazeera’s Let’s Focus, in a debate on money in US elections with Bradley Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “Nobody’s confused from the politician’s side about where this money is coming from, and they know what they need to do.”

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of Tesla and SpaceX, is the largest individual contributor of the cycle, with $446m, according to Federal Election Commission data.

He is followed by Elizabeth and Richard Uihlein, founders of the shipping supplies company Uline, and Jeff and Janine Yass. Jeff Yass cofounded the trading firm Susquehanna International Group.

All three have given to Republican-aligned groups.

The largest Democratic-aligned donors are George Soros, the billionaire investor and founder of the Open Society Foundations; Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and founder of the financial data company Bloomberg; and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and his wife, Michelle Yee.

Four individual donors have each given more than $100m. For Lessig, that concentration, not the overall cost of elections, is the real concern.

“The problem isn’t the spending. The problem is the concentration of donors,” he said. “If you don’t have $100 million to put on the table, you’re not going to matter in the way that we think that people ought to matter in a democracy.”

Political nonprofits led the organisational rankings, alongside cryptocurrency firms and an industrial conglomerate.

On the Republican side, the largest was One Nation, a nonprofit aligned with Senate Republican leadership, followed by American Action Network, which is linked to House Republican leadership. On the Democratic side, Majority Forward and House Majority Forward, nonprofits allied with the party’s Senate and House leadership, led the way.

Cryptocurrency companies also featured prominently. Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange, gave $57.8m, followed by Ripple, the blockchain payments company, with $49.6m, and Foris DAX, the company behind Crypto.com, with $39m.

The industrial conglomerate Koch gave $46.8m, while the sports betting company DraftKings contributed $40.4m.