Despite the “blue wave” of the 2018 midterms, the Republican Party still holds 61 percent of state legislative chambers. Their struggle is compounded by the tilted playing field created by Citizens United, especially at the state and local levels: A study looking back at the 2010s conducted by Anna Harvey, a professor of politics at New York University, published this fall in the journal Public Choice, concluded that Citizens United “led not only to greater likelihoods of election for Republican state legislative candidates but also to larger within-district increases in their conservatism.”

And until the last couple of years, “it just hasn’t been the case that progressives have built up organizations that are federated,” said Alex Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia professor and author of the book “State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States — and the Nation.” He argues that, even now, rather than “pool resources across states” as conservative networks do, liberals in rich blue states tend to send money to single-issue nationally led organizations, like Planned Parenthood or the American Civil Liberties Union.

One solution being pushed by some activists is to create a system of public campaign financing parallel to the widened stream of private funds. Seattle has recently adopted a “democracy voucher” program, which distributes funds to voters who can then donate to the candidates of their choice. (Seattle has also recently restricted corporate involvement in local politics through foreign interference laws.) And New York State will match six to one donations by people who give less than $250.

If broadened to the federal level, public financing might free candidates from the disproportionate influence of affluent and corporate donors, while allowing much of the money currently geared toward electioneering to be rededicated to movement building.

Once candidates are in office, such a program would spare politicians (and their constituents) the indignity of their spending as much as 70 percent of their time asking donors for money, as members of Congress currently do. Those dynamics have a concrete effect: A now infamous 2014 study that analyzed American politics across three decades found that “average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence” on public policy.

Though partisanship dominates national discourse, polls show that large majorities remain united in the belief that corruption is the most important issue facing the country. Armed with this knowledge, House Democrats passed a sprawling democracy bill last year that would provide a six-to-one federal match for any donation of $200 or less. These people-powered matching funds could supercharge the democratizing influence on politics that small online donations have already demonstrated in limited doses.