Explain New York, and Washington, and Nevada, and the money that pours out of them into Texas campaigns every cycle. 16 cents of every dollar in Texas politics comes from outside the state. It comes from people who will never vote here. Never pay a Texas tax. Never live one day under the laws they are paying to write. On paper it is legal. It is the same money we forbid from abroad, sent from one state over instead of one country over.
An election is how a people govern themselves
An election is the machinery a people use to keep power in their own hands. Someone who cannot vote here and funds the campaign anyway is not casting a preference. They are reaching into a decision that was supposed to belong to Texans. The dollar from Sacramento and the dollar from Beijing do the same work. Both let someone outside Texas shape who holds power inside it.
It decides who the winner owes
This is not a claim about who wins. A candidate can raise money from every state and still lose. The problem is quieter and harder to undo. Money is a relationship. A representative who raised half their money from donors in New York has learned whose calls to take and whose thanks to send. When a vote in Austin is close and those donors are paying attention, the pull is not toward the district. It runs toward the money. Out-of-state money does not decide who wins. It decides who the winner owes.
The pattern is documented
Political scientists who study campaign money have measured what a Texan can already feel. Most of the money in congressional campaigns comes from donors outside the district or the state, and researchers find that it changes who the winner answers to.
In a 2024 study in the journal Political Behavior, researchers ran an experiment during Georgia's 2021 US Senate runoffs. Georgians who learned that a candidate was funded by out-of-district donors expected their senator to spend significantly less time and effort on the interests of Georgians. The authors call it rivalrous representation: constituents made to share their own representative with donors who will never live under the laws that representative writes.
The money follows the same logic. A 2024 study in Political Research Quarterly traced thirty years of US Senate finance and found that out-of-state donors give most heavily to senators in tight races and reward them for the positions they take on federal issues, not for the work they do back home. Out-of-state money is a stake in the federal agenda. It is not a better advocate for the people who actually live here.
Sources: Charles Nathan, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Curtis Bram, and Jason Douglas Todd, “The Donor Went Down to Georgia: Out-of-District Donations and Rivalrous Representation,” Political Behavior (2024), and Alex Keena, “Out-of-State Donors and Legislative Surrogacy in the U.S. Senate,” Political Research Quarterly (2024).
What this index does
We built this to put a number on it. Every candidate, every committee, every dollar, traced back to where it came from. We show the share, the sources under it, and the work behind both, and we leave the verdict to you. Look up the people who want to run Texas, and see who is paying for them.
Texas elections should be decided by Texans, and Texans alone.