Rebecca Feinglos never expected to get divorced. She’d been with her partner for nine years, and married for six, but finally she had to admit to herself that her relationship had taken an abusive turn.

It was 2021 when she decided to end it. But Feinglos was surprised to discover then that the state she was living in, North Carolina, requires couples to reside in separate homes continuously for a full year before they can even file. 

“In amicable divorces you could lie, but I did not have an amicable divorce,” she told me. “It took 18 months for my divorce to be signed by a judge, and we did not have children.”

When she was finally out of her marriage she felt angry. She knew that many people could not afford to live in separate places, let alone pay for the attorneys needed to navigate all the fraught legal proceedings. Feinglos, a former state government employee with a master’s degree in public policy, started researching divorce laws nationwide. “It was so confusing even for me,” she said. “This was before ChatGPT, and all the Google search results were from family attorneys saying, ‘Oh this is really complicated, you definitely need to hire us to help you.’” She has spent the years since pushing to change those laws.

North Carolina is one of a handful of states, including South Carolina and Arkansas, that require couples to live separately for a set period before they can file for no-fault divorce. Most states make couples wait after they file, a “cooling-off” period meant to give spouses a chance to change their minds. In Wyoming, it’s 20 days. In Missouri, 30. In California, couples need to wait six months, and having children can stretch the timelines further. In some states the clock only starts when one’s spouse is formally served, which means a husband or wife who’s hard to track down can add weeks to the wait before it even begins.

“The system sets people up for conflict, sets people up for war,” said Erin Levine, a former divorce lawyer who founded a company that helps people navigate divorce outside the traditional law firm model. “In some states it’s called a ‘petition,’ in some states it’s called a ‘complaint,’ the forms say ‘spouse v. spouse’ — you are being sued.”

This issue runs, inevitably, into the culture wars. Today some conservatives are trying to make it even harder to get divorced, part of a broader push to strengthen the traditional nuclear family, built on the argument that children fare better when parents stay together. Over the last few years Republican lawmakers in states like Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas have considered new restrictions on no-fault divorce, which lets a person end a marriage without proving their spouse did something wrong. Others have proposed expanding so-called covenant marriages, which require counseling before the wedding and allow divorce only for specific reasons like adultery or abuse. House Speaker Mike Johnson has long endorsed making divorce harder, and Vice President JD Vance has complained that no-fault divorce allows people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear.” (Faced with criticism, a spokesperson later said that Vance does not support changes to divorce law.) 

But as more people come forward with stories of the financial cost, family stress, and even physical danger of extended divorce proceedings, there’s a growing push to address their complaints by making it easier to separate and divorce rather than harder. In 2023, Maryland lawmakers eliminated fault-based divorce entirely, cut Maryland’s separation mandate from a year to six months, and let couples count as separated even while living under the same roof. Washington, DC, has gone further. The same year, the DC Council unanimously scrapped its requirement that couples separate before divorce, and in Virginia, a law that took effect just last month lets people get in front of a judge on the first day they separate, instead of waiting six months or a year to sort out custody, support, and who stays in the house.

The issue has gotten more attention on social media over the last few weeks, as Jen Hamilton and Hadley (Vlahos) Fairley, two bestselling authors with more than 7 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, have started speaking out about how divorce laws in their respective states affect women like them. Hamilton, who is based in North Carolina and separated from her husband in June, has blasted the “asinine, outdated, and paternalistic laws” that keep people trapped in marriages, and has been fundraising on her platforms to help women afford to escape their unsafe relationships. 

Fairley, based in Mississippi, has been recounting the many court filings, legal fees, and emotional pain she endured for nearly three years trying to end her marriage. A no-fault divorce in Mississippi requires both spouses to agree to it, and when they don’t, the only way out is to prove in court that your spouse did something wrong, like adultery or desertion. In May, after eleven days in court, a judge finally granted Fairley a divorce, determining that her ex-husband’s conduct met the state’s legal standard for “habitual cruel and inhuman treatment,” citing a DUI he lied about under oath, more than $200,000 in secret trading losses that were mostly her earnings, a cancer diagnosis he faked to get her sympathy, and months of messages the judge called harassing and manipulative. Custody and the division of their assets are still unresolved, and more trial days are set for September.

“I understand burden of proof for a murder trial, but when it’s your personal life it’s very different,” Fairley told me. “I mean, you’re having our friends and our family go on the stand and testify to what they witnessed and it’s incredibly intrusive…even my therapy notes were subpoenaed.” 

Feinglos has been watching this all, and feeling cautiously hopeful that a reform bill pending in her state’s legislature might finally gain traction. “I do believe we’re at an inflection point,” she said.

The wait itself is the danger

Until the late 1960s, ending a marriage meant proving in court that your spouse had done something the state recognized as wrong, like cheating or abandonment. The burden fell on whoever wanted out, and meeting it often meant airing intimate details that judges weighed differently depending on whether a husband or a wife was asking. Starting in 1969, when California enacted the first no-fault law, states began letting couples divorce without assigning blame. Most followed within a decade, though holdouts like New York lingered. Divorce rates, already rising, peaked around 1980.

The laws mandating divorce waiting periods carry the logic of that earlier system. States tend to justify them by saying couples might reconcile if they’re given time. States also argue that decisions about custody and property shouldn’t be made quickly in the heat of the moment. Underneath both rationales is a theory that married households are valuable to the public, especially where children are involved, and so the state has a responsibility to slow couples down rather than treating marriages like contracts either side can simply cancel. 

Critics have long argued that the first rationale doesn’t hold up, since couples rarely reconcile during the waiting period and few people end a marriage on a whim. The second, they say, ignores what the wait actually does to someone leaving an unhappy or unsafe marriage, which is put them in danger. Separation is one of the most dangerous periods in an abusive relationship, and researchers have found that homicide risk climbs when an abuser senses they are losing control. Some research suggests a court’s intervention can make things worse rather than better if it provokes retaliation without actually getting the victim away from the abuser.

This danger has become a major issue in Virginia, where the push for divorce reform has been closely tied to a horrific murder-suicide by a prominent Democratic politician that made national headlines. 

Cerina Fairfax spent nearly two years in the same house as the husband she was trying to divorce, former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. Up until last month, Virginia required couples with children to be separated a year before they could file, though permitted them to spend that year under one roof, so long as they could show a judge the marriage was genuinely over. When she finally filed for divorce in July 2025, her husband — a lawyer, representing himself — argued she hadn’t specified that she intended their separation to be permanent and in January a judge agreed with the technicality. Cerina Fairfax was told she could amend her complaint and try again. At some point during the proceedings she installed cameras throughout their house.

On March 30 a judge granted her sole physical custody and ordered Justin Fairfax to move out within a month. He was still there when he shot her in the house in the middle of April and then killed himself. Their two teenagers were home, and the cameras were recording.

Virginia’s new divorce law had just been signed days earlier. Tucked into it was an order for a work group to study whether the state should scrap fault-based divorce altogether. Activists pushing officials to take that next step point to the Fairfax episode, arguing it shows the dangers of prolonged divorce proceedings with a spouse who could become unstable or threatening. The report is due to the legislature in December.

Courtenay Schwartz, the legal and policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, told me that while the change that just took effect in Virginia is a big one, her state’s laws still make it “very onerous” to get divorced, noting that the requirement to be separated still stands. 

“If you have someone interested in dragging out the process which Justin Fairfax was, it can really get drawn out and run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said. “It’s just prohibitively expensive, especially if you are experiencing domestic violence.” 

Schwartz says Virginia Democrats, who control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office, have grown increasingly interested in “access to justice” issues, meaning reforms that make the legal system navigable for people who can’t afford a lawyer. This has been driven partly by a 2022 Legal Services Corporation study that found 92 percent of the civil legal problems experienced by low-income Americans received inadequate or no legal help. 

North Carolina’s governor tells Vox he backs reform

Woodson Bradley, a Democratic state senator in North Carolina, won her first race in 2024 by just 209 votes, in a district the Republican-controlled legislature had redrawn the year before. She holds one of the most competitive seats in the state.

Now Bradley is the lead sponsor of SB 626, which would cut North Carolina’s separation requirement from a year to six months and let survivors of domestic violence file for divorce immediately, with no separation at all. It’s been stalled in committee for nearly a year and a half.

The issue is personal to Bradley, who experienced domestic violence in her 20s while living in another state. “When I left I was tracked down and beaten, and there were no real stalking laws back then in the 1990s,” she told me. She later moved to North Carolina, remarried someone “who I thought was wonderful, had two kids, and then things weren’t wonderful anymore.”

Bradley soon found herself in yet another abusive, coercive relationship, fleeing with her children, an experience she describes as “the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through.” It took her years to finally get a divorce, because her ex-husband continued to contest and extend the proceedings. 

Jen Hamilton, the famous labor and delivery nurse and author of the New York Times bestselling book Birth Vibes, has been raising the issue on her platforms and talking with Bradley about changing North Carolina’s laws.

“Jen speaking out is very much changing things,” Bradley told me, adding that although the issue is very partisan in North Carolina, five Republican lawmakers have reached out to her recently about her bill. Past efforts at reform in North Carolina have failed, including in 2015, 2019, and 2021.

North Carolina’s lame-duck Senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his Republican primary in March, did not return requests for comment but a spokesperson for North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Josh Stein told me he supports reform. 

“North Carolinians don’t need government making their life harder, especially during some of their darkest times,” they said. “The Governor is willing to work with anyone to ensure our laws are more appropriate for the world we live in today.” Last year Stein signed a bill that made habitual domestic violence a felony.

For Rebecca Feinglos, the proposals moving through Raleigh are still catching up to what she already lived through.

“I remember the line in my divorce decree allowing me to change my last name back to my maiden name, my now late father’s last name,” she said. “Every moment I had to use my married name throughout the proceedings felt like a reminder that I was still stuck in a life I didn’t want.”

The 2026 midterm cycle is projected to be the most expensive election cycle in US history, with candidates across the board raising money at a record pace. And voters are taking notice: Big-donor groups tied to issues like Israel policy, AI, and crypto have become major flashpoints in primary races in both parties.

Campaign spending alone doesn’t determine elections. The recent Democratic Senate primary in Michigan was the most expensive Democratic congressional primary in terms of outside spending — but ended with Abdul El-Sayed overcoming a major financial disadvantage to win the nomination. In California, billionaire Tom Steyer spent over $200 million of his own money on his bid for governor, but lost. 

But the ever-rising tide of cash helped fuel voter concerns about corruption and the campaign finance landscape is only getting more confusing: In June, the Supreme Court struck down limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their own candidates, further blurring the line between what candidates raise directly and what parties can spend on their behalf.

How can voters follow the money? How much difference does outside spending actually make in the outcomes of these races? And how much can candidates rely on grassroots donors to push back? 

Danielle M. Thomsen, a professor of political science at the University of California Irvine and author of the 2025 book, The Money Signal: How Fundraising Matters in American Politics, has spent years studying these questions. The conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Let’s start with a race like the recent Michigan Senate Democratic primary. Abdul El-Sayed was massively outspent by outside interest groups like AIPAC and still won. Does that change how you think about money’s role in politics, or is it generally consistent with what we know?

The bulk of my research is looking at US House primaries, and I think you could probably draw similar conclusions for Senate primaries, except that in most cases, Senate primaries have way more information. So in the case of Michigan, I think people knew largely what the choices were. And after you get to that stage, largely through money and advertising and voter outreach, and campaigning, after that point, money might matter less because voters become more familiar with choices. But this is a really steep hurdle in most congressional primaries.

I think that people forget how low information these contests usually are. Many primary voters really don’t know much about candidates. I think in the Michigan Senate example, that was less true. Money isn’t irrelevant, but when you have other pieces of information, that can override money. And furthermore, in that case, both of the candidates were spending millions of dollars in the primary. I mean, this is just so unique in a lot of ways.

Is there a minimum level of money congressional candidates need to be viable? Do we know?

The average for non-incumbent successful candidates in open seat primaries is about three to $400,000 in the first quarter. And if you look at incumbents who lost or struggled, well, their challengers for the most part, are not, you know, broke jokes. They’re raising $200,000 to $300,000 in their first quarter, which resembles what quote unquote “open seat candidates” are raising too in many districts. Maybe not your super wealthy districts like in New York or in California, but in many districts, $300,000 in your first quarter is a really good showing. So I would say money is money, and early money in particular is a prerequisite.

And that’s not going to mean that if you raise a lot of money, you definitely will win. That’s never been the case and that’s still not the case. But it does matter for you, it matters for who is seen to be seriously in the mix, who is perceived to be relevant. And in this cycle, just like in most cycles, virtually all contenders who are either successful or are seen as successful show support through early fundraising.

Your view is that fundraising works largely as a signal of viability and strength — to the public, party leaders, media, everyone. Is that the consensus view in political science, or are there competing frameworks?

In many ways the argument of my book is not very groundbreaking if you talk to practitioners, but it hasn’t been empirically documented in the ways that I did. Some other people in political science call attention to endorsements. The other theory is that money matters not as a signal of viability but for material goods — so to buy advertisements, office infrastructure, hiring staff, and consultants.

“Among those who run, rich candidates are also more likely to win.”

Within a candidate’s total haul, does it matter where the money comes from, like a broad base of small donors, a candidate self-funding, or a super PAC backed by a few wealthy people?

I’ve recently begun to look at this. With a graduate student of mine, Ryan Mundy, we collected data and wrote a paper on why wealthy candidates are likely to win. Because it’s not just the case that rich candidates are more likely to run, which most people know and prior research has shown, but among those who run, rich candidates are also more likely to win.

And what we show is that rich candidates are more likely to raise early money. In particular, they’re more likely to raise large-dollar donations, which then have a greater return in subsequent quarters.

What do we know about candidates who fully self-fund?

So I’ve learned that fully self-funded candidates, meaning those who don’t supplement with financial support from others, typically lose. Self-funding on its own is not as valuable as getting money from others, and in particular large-dollar donations from others.

However, many, many candidates supplement with their own money. Something like 40 percent of non-incumbent general election winners self-fund at least $10,000. I think people don’t really understand the prevalence of self-funding as a supplement, and how that keeps some people disadvantaged, particularly those who can’t self-fund at all.

For some self-funders, I think some of them just don’t want to raise money. It can be pretty unpleasant! And while self-funding with no supplemental money from others is overwhelmingly a bad strategy, there are a couple handful of people who have done this and won out of our sample that looked at 2014 to 2024. There were 407 non-incumbent general election winners in that period. And 17 of them did bankroll at least 90 percent of their first-quarter dollars and won. So not very many, but there are a handful of exceptions who do it and win, and they are all rich. So funding is complicated.

And on the “friends and family” side of early money, who’s actually writing those first checks?

Almost all early money comes from individual contributors. Most of that is itemized, so contributors over $200. Most of our elections are driven by the upper class. On average non-incumbent general election winners are getting like 50 percent of their early money from max-out donors, meaning people who pay the maximum of $6,600. Who can afford to pay that? Not normal Americans. It’s basically politically engaged, politically connected upper-middle class people who know people who run for office.

And the other thing is most of them are not repeat donors! Most of them don’t even give to more than one candidate. Because they’re probably just giving to the one rich person they know who is running for office that year. That’s why in political circles the first quarter is called the “friends and family quarter” — that’s when political consultants tell candidates to open up their Rolodex and call everybody they know from when they started kindergarten to who their coworkers are now.

Is there a point, empirically, where more spending stops helping or even backfires? I’m thinking of a case like Tom Steyer in California.

So the assumption has always been that money has diminishing returns. That goes back to Gary Jacobson’s work from forever ago. But nobody in political science puts a number on it. What they do is they say things like, Oh, the relationship is positive until at some point it goes down.

When outside groups pour money into a race, like AIPAC now, or the charter school lobby and the NRA in earlier cycles, can that spending become politically useful to the candidate it’s targeting, from backlash or otherwise?

“Most candidates are raising the bulk of their money from itemized donors. And most money is still from large donors.”

Yeah, so I don’t think there’s actually good research on this. I don’t think there’s enough information. But I think in general most people don’t know where money comes from. So the backlash is minimal. I’ve asked candidates who raised a lot of money from self-funding, “Did your self-funding ever come up?” And they’d say, “No, it never came up. I thought it would either help me, to show that I wasn’t beholden to special interests, or it would hurt me because I didn’t have the support that having fundraising money from others would demonstrate. But it didn’t come up.” Another candidate who raised a lot of money out of state told me that while it was raised a few times by people on Twitter, no one in person ever asked him about it.

Many people don’t know their own members of Congress. So you can imagine why there wouldn’t be a backlash, because people don’t know enough for there to be one — except in these cases where it does become an issue, like the recent Michigan Senate Democratic primary. It’s certainly part of the narrative for candidates like Elizabeth Warren, her stance against big money is a big part of her persona, same with Bernie Sanders and AOC. But those are real celebrity candidates.

In the 2010s, small-dollar fundraising was talked about as a democratizing counterweight to big money, but I remember reading that research found it could also make politics more polarized. Where did that political science literature land, and has the rise of small donors changed anything as Super PACs and mega-donors have grown more powerful?

So I would say the research is exactly how you describe it. There are so many studies that have shown that small-dollar donors tend to be more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans. So they are coming from the ideological edges of the spectrum. And there’s a lot of evidence of that. So that’s the finding, that’s the literature.

If you look at how candidates raise money by and large today, it’s not coming from small donations or unitemized donations. Most candidates are raising the bulk of their money from itemized donors. And most money is still from large donors.

So your read is that, despite all the attention on small-dollar fundraising, the underlying picture hasn’t shifted much either direction?

There’s a tendency to look at the cases that don’t conform to the rule rather than the rule. Like Eric Cantor [who lost in 2014] and AOC [who won in 2018]. In some cases, the losers raised way more than the partisanship of the district in those cases would predict, and then you have candidates who raised no money and unpredictably won. So there’s always this tendency to prop up the exceptions to the rule. In political science, though, we like to look at the rule.