Since 2005, I have overseen student projects to collect campaign finance data for elections in Worcester, Massachusetts. We have used these data to measure change over time in the city’s elections, to understand how much it costs to win local elections, and to assess the relationship between campaign contributions and city government. This page provides tables on fundraising for every Worcester election from 2005 to 2025.
In 2025, I worked with colleagues from the University of Massachusetts to expand this study to cover three other Massachusetts cities – Cambridge, Lowell, and Springfield. We published a book, Money, Partisanship, and Power in Local Politics, which analyzes these cities’ city council elections. The book shows that while money does not determine local election outcomes it plays a gatekeeping role – especially for nonincumbent candidates. Moreover, this money comes from a very unrepresentative segment of the electorate. Although elections in these cities are nonpartisan, individual donors and interest groups are sorted into networks that function like political parties. We show that donors tend to be substantially more liberal than city residents. This can lead cities to adopt policies that are at odds with the views and needs of cities’ less-wealthy inhabitants, including racial minorities. We show that campaign finance in midsize city elections reflects and reinforces broader patterns of political inequality. The result is a campaign finance system that disadvantages city residents who lack the cues that exist in other elections.
