Concern with the role of private funding in the American political process has a long history, and in recent years serious efforts at reform have been made. But at least to date, public funding of congressional races has not been adopted. In order to understand this country's outlier status in this regard, it is useful to review its experience with political campaign funding.

Lack of data makes it impossible to state definitively who historically paid for electoral campaigns in the United States. Campaign financing, in the words of Frank J. Sorauf, “has always been the terra incognita of American politics.” Nonetheless, what is known is that throughout the nineteenth century and into the 1930s and 1940s, the financing of races for office was principally the responsibility of political parties and not, as is the case at present, that of individual candidates. The lack of systematic information makes it difficult to be certain which of the two ways that parties raised funds in those years was more important: voluntary contributions made by wealthy donors or the obligatory payments made by individuals who had been granted jobs or favors by their party.

During the 1890s, the Gilded Age of American politics, the obligatory component of party finance, according to Mark Wahlgen Summers, took the form of assessments on “officeholders in particular and partisans in general.”