Candidates point to programs in Maine, Denver, Evanston and New York City
Several newly elected Democrats and a longtime party strategist are calling for public financing of federal campaigns, arguing that public money can reduce candidates’ reliance on private donors who may expect legislative favors. Senator-elects Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson, incoming representatives Daniel Biss and Melat Kiros, and Democratic strategist Tad Devine have each promoted the approach. Their positions advance an argument by The Guardian US columnist David Sirota that narrower ethics rules will not change how campaigns are financed unless public money enters the system.
Sirota wrote that corruption topped the list of Americans’ concerns in the midterms and that candidates won by promising to reject corporate PAC money and linking Washington’s pay-to-play culture to affordability, amid billions spent to try to buy the elections. He noted that Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff is generating presidential buzz ahead of a possible 2028 campaign with speeches attacking a “coin-operated” government and Citizens United. Ossoff called the ruling “the most destructive supreme court decision in modern American history” and has proposed overturning it, enacting a congressional stock-trading ban and prohibiting traditional corporate political action committees.
Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has proposed barring government officials from betting in prediction markets, forcing them to put assets in blind trusts and prohibiting them from accepting foreign gifts. Kansas senator-elect Adam Hamilton has offered Emanuel’s prescriptions and a ban on lobbying by retired members of Congress. Speaking to American Prospect, Hamilton said, “What I’d like to do is figure out how we help get money out of politics instead of having it dictating politics.” Sirota characterized those steps as limited reforms and argued that even repealing Citizens United would do little by itself to make campaign financing resistant to corruption.
El-Sayed offered the most explicit matching proposal in an interview with Sirota: “There are things that we could do, like publicly fund campaigns, where if there’s a Super Pac that spends on a campaign, then it triggers public funding equal and opposite to that expenditure.” Jackson said a substantive anti-corruption agenda “means advocating for publicly financed federal campaigns modeled after Maine’s historic clean-election system.”
Biss has cited his community’s local public financing program as a model for Congress, while Kiros said, “We need to have a caucus that is laser-focused on actually pushing through publicly financed elections. That’s going to be one of the first things that I do.” Devine said, “The Democratic party should explore the idea of trying to create a system of public financing for elections,” and added, “We’re going to have to fight within our own party to make it happen, because it’s going to put the Wall Street guys out of business.”
Under the clean-election model Sirota describes, candidates’ small-dollar donations are matched with public money at multiples that let them run competitively resourced races. He said the structure gives candidates a way to seek office without relying on money that comes with an expectation of legislative favors. Sirota also argued that small-dollar fundraising alone would not give most candidates for lower-profile offices the resources to compete, without requiring them to turn local campaigns into national spectacles on Instagram.
Public financing systems already operate in a handful of states and cities, including Evanston, Denver and New York City. Sirota said Zohran Mamdani’s historic mayoral campaign against the billionaire class probably would never have gotten off the ground without New York City’s municipal matching funds. Mamdani told him, “It’s incredibly important,” because the system allows “the amplification of the voice of ordinary New Yorkers, as opposed to the billionaires who have grown used to buying our elections.”
At the national level, Sirota proposed rebuilding the defunct presidential public financing system and extending public financing to congressional races. He said a Congress elected in 2026 and a president elected in 2028 on anti-corruption waves could establish a federal program. If Democrats did not initially pass a universal system, he said, Congress could at least allow the 14 states with public financing systems to extend those systems to congressional and senatorial races.
Sirota also said blue states with new majorities could begin adopting public financing and pointed to Colorado as a possible test. Democratic candidate Phil Weiser won the gubernatorial primary after promising “the future of Colorado will not be decided by out-of-state billionaires,” and he supports public campaign financing. Sirota said Weiser and incoming representative Kiros could spearhead a ballot measure extending Denver’s system statewide.
The wider agenda Sirota outlined would use Democratic congressional subpoenas to investigate Super PACs and potential quid-pro-quo arrangements in both parties, strengthen federal efforts to outlaw Super PACs and support a landmark court case to limit donations, and enact longstanding legislation requiring full disclosure of the sources of $1bn of dark money. He also backed Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s bill to close loopholes that let federal contractors — and owners such as Elon Musk — circumvent existing election-spending limits. At the state and party levels, he urged Michigan-style disclosure rules, restrictions on spending by utilities and government contractors, Montana- and Hawaii-style changes to bar corporate election spending, and Democratic rules that reward candidates rejecting Super PAC money while penalizing those who rely on it.
Funding such a system would require new revenue, and Sirota listed several options: ending the tax-exempt status of Super PACs and dark-money groups through legislation from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, charging corporate vendors a corruption fee on all large federal contracts they receive, imposing levies on the lobbying industry, levying a surtax on billionaires or imposing a tiny tax on all text messages from political groups. He described the revenue question as the easier part and political will as the harder one.
Congress has periodically considered public financing and has come close to enacting it after corruption scandals, according to Sirota. He described a scenario in which Democrats tout a stock-trading ban as a visible response to anti-corruption sentiment or defer to President Donald Trump because of his expected veto. Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said, “I do not think it is time to propose things that the president of the United States is guaranteed to veto,” adding, “I think that is somewhat of a bit of wasted energy.” Sirota argued that a serious agenda would force Trump and the Republican party either to join it or veto it.
Sirota wrote that “The real answer to the campaign financing problem is not some newfangled innovation. It is an old idea involving public money.” He argued that public financing could disempower both parties’ oligarch donors and that the unresolved task was turning anti-Citizens United sentiment into concrete legislation before the 2028 election. The question he left for Democrats was whether they would support changes that challenge donor power or settle for symbolic measures.