Episode
State of Advocacy: Legislative Update
- Published
- Jun 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1022
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/rules-of-the-game-the-bolder-advocacy-podcast-744868/episodes/state-of-advocacy-legislative-update/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/rules-of-the-game-the-bolder-advocacy-podcast-744868/state-of-advocacy-legislative-update.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
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 · Louisiana increased the threshold triggering disclosure for certain campaign contributions. · West Virginia now not only prevents the public disclosure of certain contributor information, but also created a new criminal penalty for violations of the disclosure prohibition. · Kansas eliminated the requirement for political committees to disclose the names of vendors when reporting disbursements New Ballot Measure Procedures · Ballot measure legislation accounted for 20% of the bills we monitored, about 350 pieces of legislation. Here, we saw 22 laws enacted across 13 states plus D…