Campaigns spend more on security as threats of political violence grow

The campaign trail has increasingly demanded money for safety measures, with a new report finding that political committees have logged sharply higher spending on candidate security as threats to public officials have intensified in recent years.

The Public Service Alliance, a nonpartisan group focused on security for public officials, released its report Thursday and said security spending for congressional and presidential campaigns has jumped fivefold over the past decade. The report focused on threats that range from online harassment such as doxing to physical attacks, and it tied the rise in documented costs to a more hostile political environment.

In the report’s latest publicly available data, federal political committees spent more than $40 million on expenses labeled as security during the 2023-24 campaign cycle, according to the organization. The report said it did not identify which specific candidates spent the most on security.

The organization also said its tally is narrower than the full set of security-related expenditures around federal office. It did not include security costs paid by the federal government, which it said includes augmented Capitol Police services for members of Congress and heightened U.S. Secret Service protection for presidential candidates, including former and current presidents and their families.

The report arrived amid a decade of high-profile political violence in the United States. The Associated Press report cited incidents including the 2017 shooting of a Republican congressional baseball team practice in Alexandria, Virginia; the 2022 hammer assault on the husband of Democratic then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in California; and the 2024 assassination attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. It also cited the assassinations last year of a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in Utah.

The Public Service Alliance said it calculated campaign security costs by reviewing publicly available Federal Election Commission filings and tallying only expenses that were explicitly marked for security. It said those totals represent a small fraction of the billions spent in each two-year election cycle on presidential and congressional campaigns, while also saying the figures are conservative and likely understate the total financial costs of security for political campaigns.

One area where the report found substantial growth was digital security, which includes protecting against hackers and monitoring online threats. The report said spending rose from $50,000 total in the 2015-16 election cycle to $900,000 in 2023-24. It also said another major increase involved home security, saying campaigns spent nearly $1 million on home security during the past decade after spending nothing in that category during 2015-16.

Sherman, the report’s author, highlighted a home-targeting dynamic that has accompanied the rise in those costs. He said critics are increasingly likely to post home addresses of elected officials on social media, describing it as doxing, and he pointed to attacks at residences in recent cases, including an attack on Pelosi’s husband in San Francisco and an attack on Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home.

Sherman said campaign security at public events is expected, adding that home targeting is different. He said, “It’s expected that, say, a GOTV event or a campaign rally is going to have metal detectors and security,” and Sherman added that “It’s expected” contrasts with “targeting the homes of candidates and officeholders” as “a new frontier.” He also said, “This is not a good place to be as a country,” in remarks tied to the report.

Sherman said the report’s findings raise a practical barrier for people considering running for office. He noted that members of Congress receive money in office budgets that can be used for security, but he said people thinking of running for office “now have to factor home security costs into their decision-making,” calling it “a troubling time when the security spend is becoming a greater barrier for someone running for office.”