Everyone in Georgia politics can tell you what the governor's race costs. Rick Jackson has put $111 million of his own money into his campaign, and you have heard about it. What almost nobody can tell you — including, in our experience, people who work in Georgia politics — is what is happening two rungs down, in the 236 seats that actually write the laws that govern your day.
So we counted. Not a sample, not the competitive seats, not the ones that made the news. Every candidate committee registered for a Georgia state House or state Senate seat in the 2026 cycle — 581 of them.
Here is the shape of it.
| 2026 state legislative field | Democratic | Republican |
|---|---|---|
| Candidates who filed | 321 | 252 |
| Who have raised anything | 293 | 215 |
| Total raised | $19,336,058 | $33,751,433 |
| Average, funded candidates | $65,993 | $156,983 |
| Median, funded candidates | $14,630 | $82,505 |
Democrats are fielding 69 more candidates than Republicans and holding 36.4% of the two-party money. That is the headline, and it is real. But the headline is not the story.
The median is the story
Averages lie in campaign finance, because a handful of enormous war chests drag them upward. The median — the candidate standing exactly in the middle of the pack — does not lie.
Sit with what $14,630 buys in a Georgia legislative district of roughly 60,000 people. It does not buy a full-time campaign manager. It does not buy a sustained mail program. In much of the state it does not buy meaningful broadcast or streaming advertising. It buys yard signs, a website, some digital ads, gas money, and a candidate working nights and weekends after their day job.
The distribution makes it starker:
| Funded candidates who have raised… | Democratic | Republican |
|---|---|---|
| under $10,000 | 124 (42%) | 49 (23%) |
| under $25,000 | 175 (60%) | 63 (29%) |
| under $50,000 | 205 (70%) | 79 (37%) |
| under $100,000 | 240 (82%) | 114 (53%) |
Six in ten funded Georgia Democrats running for the legislature have raised less than $25,000. Fewer than three in ten Republicans are in that position.
Democrats are not failing to show up. They are showing up nearly everywhere, and arriving with almost nothing.
Democratic money is more concentrated than Republican money
This is the finding we did not expect, and it complicates the easy story.
You might assume the party with less money spreads it thinner and the party with more money piles it up. The opposite is true here. The top 10% of funded Democratic candidates hold 55.9% of all Democratic money. The top 10% of Republicans hold 38.7% of Republican money.
Democratic money in Georgia is more top-heavy than Republican money. It pools around a small number of well-known incumbents — several of them in metro Atlanta seats that are not remotely at risk — while the broad field runs on fumes.
The six largest Democratic hauls in the state legislative field are all state Senate committees, led by $817,257 and $667,642. Meanwhile 124 funded Democratic candidates have not cleared $10,000 between them all cycle.
To be fair about the comparison: Republicans have their own outlier, a single Senate committee at $1.78 million — the largest legislative war chest in the state, and larger than any Democratic one by more than twice. The difference is that behind it sits a deep bench of six-figure Republican campaigns, which is exactly what the median measures.
153 "contested" races. Seventeen real ones.
Georgia has 236 legislative seats. Filings exist in 233 districts. On paper, 153 districts have both a Democrat and a Republican — which sounds like a broadly competitive map.
It is not. When you require that both candidates have actually raised money, and that neither is beating the other by more than three to one, the map collapses:
Here is the entire competitive map of the Georgia legislature, by money:
| Seat | Democrat | Republican | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| House 99 | $441,422 | $241,562 | 1.8x D |
| House 48 | $227,220 | $405,344 | 1.8x R |
| House 50 | $291,329 | $163,707 | 1.8x D |
| House 47 | $166,531 | $129,668 | 1.3x D |
| House 44 | $73,010 | $217,073 | 3.0x R |
| House 121 | $130,585 | $117,750 | 1.1x D |
| House 120 | $70,416 | $171,440 | 2.4x R |
| Senate 48 | $100,290 | $129,201 | 1.3x R |
| House 149 | $70,338 | $75,675 | 1.1x R |
| House 105 | $75,314 | $62,778 | 1.2x D |
| House 34 | $55,286 | $75,764 | 1.4x R |
| Senate 37 | $73,656 | $53,750 | 1.4x D |
| House 81 | $41,055 | $51,280 | 1.3x R |
| House 131 | $26,519 | $65,100 | 2.5x R |
| Senate 16 | $15,152 | $23,625 | 1.6x R |
| House 23 | $10,844 | $18,442 | 1.7x R |
| House 119 | $7,383 | $14,025 | 1.9x R |
Read this table carefully
These figures are the best-funded committee of each party in the district — which is not always the November nominee, and we want to be explicit about that rather than let you assume otherwise.
House 47 is the worked example. The largest Republican committee in that district belongs to Jan Jones, the House Speaker Pro Tempore, who announced on February 20, 2026 that she would not seek re-election. Her committee still holds $145,150. The actual Republican nominee is Jack Miller, who won the June 16 runoff over Brian Cochran with $129,668 — the figure now shown above. Had we published the larger number without checking, we would have staged a race between two people who are not running against each other.
We are verifying the nominee in all seventeen districts before we publish individual head-to-head pages for them. Eight of the seventeen have more than one funded candidate on one side, so eight need that check. Where a correction is required, it will change a number in this table, not the finding — the median gap is computed across all 581 committees and does not depend on who won any primary.
Seventeen seats. Democrats lead the money in six of them. Note the bottom of that table — Senate 16, House 23 and House 119 qualify as "competitive" only because both candidates are close to broke. A race decided between a $7,383 campaign and a $14,025 campaign is competitive in the way a tied game is competitive when neither team can find the field.
Why the gap exists
We can document the gap precisely. Explaining it requires more care, and we want to separate what we can show from what we are inferring.
What the records show
Georgia's disclosure system captures candidate committees. It does not capture everything that funds a legislative race. Two structural features sit outside the numbers above.
Leadership committees. Under SB 221, passed in 2021, Georgia allows leadership committees that can accept unlimited contributions and coordinate directly with campaigns. They are available to the governor, the lieutenant governor, their general-election opponents, and the party caucus leadership in each chamber. That money does not appear in any candidate's committee total, and its practical effect is to let a small number of leaders steer very large sums.
Incumbency. Republicans have held both chambers of the Georgia legislature since 2005. Incumbents raise more than challengers everywhere, in every state, in both parties — because access is what most legislative giving is buying. A majority that has been in place for two decades compounds that advantage across an entire bench.
What we are inferring
The concentration finding suggests a strategic choice, or at least a strategic drift: Democratic donors in Georgia are giving to candidates they have heard of, in places they already win. That is a rational instinct for an individual donor and a poor outcome for a party, because the marginal dollar does the most work in the seventeen seats above, not in a district that will go 70-30 either way.
We cannot prove intent from disclosure records, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can say is that the pattern is visible, it is measurable, and it is not the pattern on the Republican side.
What this does and doesn't mean
Money does not decide elections. It buys the ability to be heard. Candidates get outspent and win — it happens in Georgia every cycle. Anyone telling you the money table above is a results table is selling something.
Some of the gap is structural, not a failure. Fifty-two districts have only a Democrat on the ballot. Those are seats Democrats hold safely, where no serious money is needed and none is raised. They pull the Democratic median down while representing exactly zero problem.
And running everywhere has value that a spreadsheet cannot see. A candidate on the ballot in a district you will lose by 30 points still forces the incumbent to spend, still gives voters someone to vote for, and still builds the local party. There is a real argument that 321 candidates is a strength, not a symptom.
But those caveats do not dissolve the finding. They sharpen it. The question is not whether Georgia Democrats should contest 321 seats. It is whether a party contesting 321 seats has any plan for funding the seventeen that are actually in play.
Right now, in eleven of those seventeen, the Republican has more money.
How we counted this
Method
Georgia's ethics commission publishes candidate committee registrations and running totals through a public API. We paged through every candidate committee filer in the system — 1,488 records — and filtered in code to the 2026 Georgia State Election cycle, offices "State Representative" and "State Senator." That yields 581 committees across 233 districts.
We did not use the API's own office or district filters. We tested them: the office filter is ignored outright and returns the full unfiltered result, and the district-type filter changes the result set without actually filtering by district type — which is worse, because it looks like it worked. Every filter in this report was applied in our own code against the raw records.
We verified completeness rather than assuming it. We checked all 234 sitting Georgia legislators against the crawl: 190 matched on filer name directly, and all 44 apparent misses resolved to name variants already present in the data (Sen. Russ Goodman files as "Goodman, Rustin E."). Records genuinely absent: zero.
We verified the money figures against totals we had already confirmed independently for the governor's race and several legislative races; they matched to the cent.
Caveats we want you to have
These totals include primary losers. A candidate who lost in May still raised the money they raised, and it is still money the party's donors gave to state legislative candidates — so we counted it. A nominees-only cut would produce smaller totals on both sides. It would not close a 5.6x median gap.
Figures are cycle-to-date as reported as of September 5, 2026, and will move. The next Georgia disclosure deadline is September 30.
Committee totals are not campaign spending. They exclude leadership committees, party committees, independent expenditures and outside groups, none of which are disclosed at the candidate level.
Three districts have no filings at all, and a small number of candidates file under committee names that differ from their ballot names. Where a person had more than one committee, we counted the best-funded one rather than summing, to avoid double-counting a rollover.
Sources
- Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission — PeachFile, candidate committee registrations and financial totals, 2026 Georgia State Election cycle. All 1,488 candidate-committee records retrieved September 5, 2026.
- Georgia Ethics Commission — 2022–2025 records archive, used to cross-check filer identity for committees active in earlier cycles.
- Georgia SB 221 (2021) — establishing leadership committees and their exemption from contribution limits.
- Seat counts and district numbering: Georgia General Assembly — 180 House districts, 56 Senate districts.
Our underlying dataset is reproducible: the puller and the analysis are published in the site's tooling as pull_state_legislative_field.py. If you find an error in these numbers, tell us and we will correct it in public.