While pairing the term “dark money” with a big number makes for an attention-grabbing headline, you’d be hard pressed to find a consistent number for so-called “dark money spending” in the 2024 elections. That’s not due to any dearth of reporting on the publicly available data for election spending. It’s due to the fact that there’s no agreed upon or precise definition of “dark money.”

Trying to pin down a “dark money” number is akin to searching for a precise number of sitting Members of Congress who are “unamerican.” The term is almost exclusively deployed as an attack on ideological opponents; therefore, the meaning shifts based on who’s using it and who’s being targeted. Watch any congressional hearing on “dark money,” and you’ll find Democrats demonizing conservative groups and Republicans taking aim at progressive groups.

The term is most often used to describe spending on electoral advocacy from certain nonprofits that are legally able to engage in such spending so long as it is not their primary purpose. These organizations – namely 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, 501(c)(5) labor organizations, and 501(c)(6) trade associations – must report election-related spending and publicly identify donors who give to support such spending, but they do not face the same broad donor disclosure requirements as political committees. That is because they are not political committees, which are organizations whose primary purpose is to engage in electoral advocacy.

Yet, depending on where you look, the reported “dark money” number may exclude labor organizations, include LLCs, or even incorporate super PAC spending – despite the fact that super PACs are political committees and must publicly disclose their donors by law. While the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is the source of all raw data on federal election spending, many journalists and researchers have long relied on the organization OpenSecrets to present FEC data in digestible ways. As a result, “dark money” numbers in news reports, blogs, etc. are very often whatever OpenSecrets says they are. Unfortunately, OpenSecrets’ reported “dark money” numbers are often cited with little understanding or context of what they actually represent, and the average reader is often left, well, in the dark, on what’s actually included in those numbers.

On the “Dark Money Basics” page, “Total Outside Spending with No Disclosure of Donors” is shown to be $170.22 million for the 2024 federal election cycle. (According to the “Outside Spending, by Group” page, this number is based on FEC data current as of March 19, 2025.)

Adding the numbers for all 501(c) groups, the total nonprofit spending for the 2024 election cycle is $70.67 million.

So, if “dark money” is commonly understood to be political spending by groups not required to disclose donors, what accounts for the nearly $100 million difference between these two numbers?

With some digging elsewhere on OpenSecrets, you’ll find that the “No Disclosure” number includes spending by super PACs that receive contributions from “nondisclosing” groups, sometimes called “gray money.” In other words, even though super PACs are required by law to disclose their donors, OpenSecrets still includes some super PAC spending in the “No Disclosure” number.

Elsewhere, you’ll find that the total for spending by nonprofit organizations includes not only “independent expenditures” but also “communication costs” and “electioneering communications.” Of these categories, only independent expenditures are public communications advocating the election or defeat of candidates (known as “express advocacy”). “Electioneering communications” are issue advocacy communications that merely refer to a candidate close to an election, and “communication costs” account for spending on internal communications that must be reported by labor organizations, trade associations, and membership organizations.

Putting these details aside, any accounting of “dark money” spending is a tiny percentage of overall spending on federal elections.

According to OpenSecrets, $15.5 billion was spent on federal elections during the 2024 cycle. Even using the misleading number for “Total Outside Spending with No Disclosure of Donors,” which includes some spending by groups that do disclose donors, “dark money” groups account for a little over 1% of total election spending in 2024. The OpenSecrets total for nonprofit spending, which includes more than spending on public “express advocacy” communications (or “independent expenditures”), accounts for less than 0.5% of total 2024 election spending.

When lawmakers claim that legislation is needed to “End Dark Money” spending, it’s important to put this spending, however it may be defined, in perspective. Are efforts to eliminate such an insignificant source of election spending worth the significant impact that such legislation would have on the First Amendment rights of nonprofits and their supporters?

Nonprofits that engage in limited, incidental electoral advocacy have a First Amendment right to do so, and federal law already requires these groups to report all such spending and report donors that give to fund such spending. Proposals like the DISCLOSE Act would force groups to publicly expose donors who gave to support nonprofits’ overall mission, not just those who gave to support political spending, as required by current law. Furthermore, anti-“dark money” proposals almost always reach far beyond electoral advocacy and would impact nonprofits engaged in issue speech and threaten the privacy of their supporters. The end result would be less civic engagement from nonprofits across the ideological spectrum that have long made important contributions to issue and policy debates throughout American history.

Sensational rhetoric surrounding so-called “dark money,” and the legislation inspired by and backed by such rhetoric, is a threat to every Americans’ First Amendment right to privately support nonprofits and the causes they care about most.