State of Advocacy: Legislative Update

On today's episode, we are breaking down the 2026 state legislative season and how the landscape affecting nonprofit advocacy is shifting across the country. We are recording this in mid-June, and while most states have wrapped up for the year, not all have, so you are going to want to look at your state to get a sense of what's enacted, what's moving, and what's dead. What we're seeing this year is not just incremental change, but a rapid expansion of state-level regulation over campaign finance, ballot measures, voter access, and increasingly, what we are calling foreign influence laws or national security-style frameworks applied to civil society.

Attorneys for this episode

Maggie Ellinger-Locke

Susan Finkle Sourlis

Natalie Ossenfort

Shownotes

Overview

·      This year, 46 states plus DC held legislative sessions.

·      We tracked roughly 1,000 bills that could impact nonprofit advocacy.

·      Of those bills that have now become law, almost half relate to state campaign finance and / or ballot measure processes.

·      Perhaps the biggest story of the 2026 legislative session is the expansion of laws that borrow concepts from national security and apply them to nonprofit advocacy.

New Campaign Finance Laws