A Sovereign Good analysis of the 2026 midterms, the math behind America’s most expensive electoral cycle, and what audacious donors can do about the gap.
By Joanna Aguirre | Co-Founder
OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan group that tracks money in U.S. politics, projects that federal spending on the 2026 midterms will reach $11.9 billion. That counts candidates, parties, and outside groups. It is a record for a midterm, up from $8.9 billion in 2022. Only the 2024 presidential cycle, projected at $15.9 billion, cost more.
Campaigns will always cost money. We wanted to ask something else: what could $11.9 billion do if it were pointed at human need?
Each figure below names its source, so you can check our work. Where a number is an estimate, we say so.
Housing: $9.6 billion a year
In March 2025, the National Alliance to End Homelessness published a cost study co-authored by Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania. It asked what it would take to offer Housing First to every household now staying in a homeless shelter. Housing First means a permanent home comes first, with services after. The answer was an additional $9.6 billion a year, in 2022 dollars, for about 1.05 million households. The study covers sheltered households only, not people sleeping outside.
One year of that cost would use up $9.6 billion of the midterm total and leave $2.3 billion.
There is evidence the approach works at scale. The VA reports that veteran homelessness has fallen 56 percent since 2010, to 32,495 people in January 2025, while Congress and the VA expanded housing vouchers and rapid re-housing for veterans.
Food: about a month and a half of SNAP
SNAP, the federal food assistance program, served 41.7 million people a month in fiscal year 2024. Benefits that year totaled $93.7 billion, about $7.8 billion a month, according to USDA. The midterms will cost roughly a month and a half of that.
USDA's Economic Research Service has estimated that in a slowing economy, every $1 in SNAP benefits produces about $1.54 in economic activity, because recipients spend it quickly at local grocery stores.
The health findings are more modest. A 2017 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that adults on SNAP had about $1,400 less in yearly medical spending than similar adults who qualified but did not enroll, roughly 25 percent less. That study is observational, so it shows a link, not proof of cause. Economists Hilary Hoynes, Diane Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond found that children who gained access to food stamps when the program rolled out grew into adults with better health and more economic self-sufficiency.
Rural hospitals: $4 billion a year
The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a rural health policy group, counts 698 rural hospitals at risk of closing, about one in three, and 260 at immediate risk (October 2026). It estimates that raising payments enough to prevent those closures would cost about $4 billion a year. The midterms will cost nearly three times that.
Closures are already happening. The Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina counts 154 rural hospital closures or conversions since 2010: 86 closed outright, and 68 gave up inpatient care. The loss shows up first in the delivery room. CHQPR reports that 144 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies since the end of 2020, and in 12 states, fewer than a third of rural hospitals still do.
Research on closures between 2005 and 2015 found they fell on communities with larger Black and Hispanic populations and higher unemployment. When a rural hospital closes, a community often loses its nearest emergency room, and the next one may be hours away.
What Sovereign Good does with this math
We build the strategy and structure that help a donor's money reach the people it is meant for and produce the result the donor wants. The needs above have clear solutions and willing local organizations. What they lack is funding and the systems to use it well.
We start before the check is written. A donor who cares about homelessness and sends $10 million to the first organization with a good pitch has funded an organization, not a solution. We help you write down how a gift leads to a result (some call this a theory of change), then choose the approach with the strongest evidence behind it, such as Housing First.
We vet the organizations that would carry out the work the way an investor vets a fund manager. Who runs the program? What is their track record? How is the board structured, and how do they report their finances and outcomes? Most donors, even experienced ones, don't have time for that level of review. We do it.
We design giving so it teaches something. The Canva Foundation says it has committed $150 million to GiveDirectly's work in Malawi, including $100 million announced in October 2025. Part of that money pays for a large randomized trial, led by Oxford researchers, testing whether the 2.5-to-1 local economic boost found in GiveDirectly's Kenya study (Egger et al., Econometrica, 2022) holds in Malawi. Results aren't published yet. That is the giving we want to help build: money that also produces knowledge.
And we stay with you after the gift. Most giving fails in the follow-through, when no one reports back on what happened. We set up regular reporting so you can see results in people housed, children fed, and hospitals still open.
An invitation
The most expensive midterm in American history ends on November 3. The needs above will still be there on November 4, and so will the donors who funded this cycle. Some of them are probably wondering whether their money could go somewhere else next time.
That question is where our best work begins. We work with first-time philanthropists and with donors who have given for decades and want to give with more care. We work with individuals, families, and foundations in the United States and abroad.
You don't need an answer before you call us. Bring the question to hi@sovereigngood.org
Sources: OpenSecrets (2026 cycle projection); National Alliance to End Homelessness, March 2025; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; USDA Food and Nutrition Service; USDA Economic Research Service; Berkowitz et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2017; Hoynes, Schanzenbach and Almond; Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform; Sheps Center, UNC; Canva; Egger et al., Econometrica, 2022.