For anyone even remotely interested in US politics, the midterm elections are the only game in town at the moment. In fact, there has already been plenty of ink spilled about what a “blue wave” landslide for the Democrats might mean for Trump and Trumpism – and how likely that outcome even is.

If polling is anything to go by, prospects are looking increasingly grim for the Republicans. But I want to take a minute to point to a secondary data source which supports this – money.

The Republicans, to quote Politico, are getting completely “smoked” when it comes to fundraising for the midterms. Their candidates – in red states and blue – are raising significantly less cash than the Democrats.

This simply means the Democrats have been able to spend far more money on their campaigns than Republicans. According to the Federal Election Commission, which publishes data on fundraising and spending, candidates have spent about US$2.85 billion (£2.12 billion) in this election cycle. And the big spenders have pretty much all been Democrats.

This matters. There’s a whole lot that we don’t know about money in politics, but there’s also a decent amount we do. One thing we know, is that money matters for electoral outcomes. That doesn’t mean those that spend more money will necessarily win an election – just ask Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, both of whom raised significantly more money than Donald Trump, but still lost. But candidates need to spend a certain amount of cash (think of it like a start-up cost) to stand a chance in the first place.

As the Clinton and Harris examples show, having (and spending) a huge war chest doesn’t guarantee victory. But in donor-led democracies like the USA and the UK, the ability to raise money is tied to, and tells us something about, electoral prospects. People don’t tend to give money to candidates they don’t see as having a realistic prospect of winning – you wouldn’t bet on a donkey to win the Kentucky Derby.

We saw an example of this during the UK 2024 general election. The Conservatives, to borrow the American phrase, were getting smoked by Labour when it came to raising money prior to the election. In fact, pre-poll donations to the Tories fell by 90% between 2019 and 2024. People didn’t think they were going to win, and they were right, so they kept their hands in their pockets.

When the Financial Times asked some Tory donors why this might be, they revealed another thing we know about money in politics: that most donors do want something in return for the money they give. “Any self-respecting businessperson conducts due diligence before an investment decision,” said one donor. “Time will tell whether the smart money will back Mr Sunak.” It didn’t.

We are seeing this story playing out again in the 2026 US midterms. It seems the smart money in the US is looking at the price of diesel, looking at the general sense of chaos engulfing the Trump administration and, most importantly, looking at Donald Trump’s catastrophic approval ratings – and sitting this one out.

The Republicans aren’t broke

But that’s not the full story. While Democratic candidates are out-raising their Republican rivals by five to one from donations, Republicans are bringing in more than Democrats from outside groups. These are political action committees (PACs) and super-PACs.

But this is partisan money, not smart money – it’s cash generated by each side’s political machine, most of which can’t be committed to supporting individual candidates due to the complexities of US campaign finance laws. So it tells us far less about electoral prospects.

Elon Musk, for example, is the primary funder of Texas PAC which has spent US$131 million attacking James Talarico, the Senate candidate for the Democrats in Texas. He gave a further US$158m to the general Republican Senate Super PAC in the last financial quarter too.

So let’s not kid ourselves that the Republicans are suddenly electoral paupers. The Texas spending alone is far more than all spending, from all parties, at the 2024 general election in the UK.

Money talks

This, of course, speaks volumes about US politics, and is something that should cause concern in other democracies that choose not to place upper limits on donations or spending. Since a 2010 Supreme Court case known as Citizens United (which ruled that the first amendment protecting freedom of speech also applied to political donations), spending in the US – particularly from PACs and Super PACs – has ballooned exponentially.

All the while the pool of donors has got smaller. Figures from the 2024 presidential election cycle are pretty stark on this. In 2008, mega-donors – classified as those that give over US$1 million – made up just 4% of Republican funders. By 2024 that figure was 56%.

It is widely agreed that for elections to have integrity they should embody principles of fair participation, deliberation, contestation and adjudication. All of these are undermined by a system of political financing like this. Or, put differently, speech isn’t all that free if everyone’s trying to talk and a crazy guy with a megaphone drowns them out.

The lesson I draw from this for the UK is that creating an oligarchic state where a few parties are largely, if not entirely, propped up by the world’s richest men is not a massively healthy sign of functioning democracy. Or, as I put it to the New York Times last week: “We kind of point to the US as a system of worst practices.”

What does this tell us about US politics in 2026? Well, the smart money is saying the Republicans are in for a thrashing. But this is an America where a smart approach to money in politics left the building a long time ago. And the rest of us – especially in the UK – could learn an awful lot from that too.