About the data

• Raised by campaigns is each candidate's total receipts for the cycle as reported by their authorized committees: individual donations, PAC and party contributions, the candidate's own money and loans, and transfers. Senate figures cover the two-year cycle, not the whole six-year term.
• PAC checks are direct contributions from political committees to candidates (FEC transaction types 24K and 24Z). We classify each giver using the FEC's committee master file: corporate PACs, trade associations, labor unions, membership and ideological groups, politicians' leadership PACs, super PACs and party committees. A “Lobbyist PAC” tag means the committee is registered with the FEC as a lobbyist/registrant PAC.
• Outside money is independent expenditures: money super PACs, party committees and other groups spent on their own to support or attack a candidate. It does not include “dark money” issue ads that never name a candidate close to an election, because those are not reported.

• The 2026 ballot and race calls come from Wikipedia's 2026 Senate and House election pages, which editors update as news outlets call races. The FEC's own general election candidate list is published months after the election. Results were last pulled Nov 4, 2026 UTC. A race is “called” once a winner is marked there.
• Every candidate on the ballot is matched to their FEC record by seat, last name, party and incumbency. A handful of minor candidates have no FEC filing at all and show as having no finance data.
• For outside spenders, a dollar is on the winning side if it supported the winner or opposed a loser. For primary spending, “won” means the supported candidate made it onto the November ballot. Spending in races that have not been called is “pending” and left out of win rates.
• A spender is called a Winner when at least 65% of its decided money landed on the winning side, a Loser at 35% or less, and Mixed in between.
• “Did more money win?” compares the winner's campaign fundraising with the best-funded losing candidate's, in called races only.

• Industries are assigned by keyword from each donor's employer or organisation name and each PAC's sponsor, with a hand-checked list for the biggest names. Anyone who does not match (retired, self-employed, a holding company with a bland name) is left out, so industry totals are a floor. Dark-money nonprofits and PAC-to-PAC transfers are not assigned an industry.
• The money map pro-rates each industry's gifts to a super PAC by how that group split its spending between parties and results. Money a group has not spent yet is left off the map.
• Politician pages follow one FEC candidate ID across cycles, so someone who moved from the House to the Senate appears under two IDs. The rep lookup maps zip codes to districts with the Census zip-to-district file for the current decade; states that redrew their maps for 2026 may not match, so a state and district picker is there as a fallback.

• The Issues pages take 60 roll calls from the 117th to 119th Congresses that the industries on this site lobbied on hardest, hand-picked and labelled with the side each industry wanted. Votes come from Voteview (UCLA) and are linked to the House and Senate clerks' records; members are matched to their FEC candidate IDs through the unitedstates/congress-legislators project.
• A member's industry money is PAC checks from that industry's PACs plus super PAC support credited to the industry in proportion to its share of each group's traced donors, added up across every run in this site (2020–2026). Dark-money groups credit nothing, so it is a floor. “Funded” means at least $10K from the industry.
• Money and votes line up for many reasons: industries give to members who already agree with them, and party explains most votes. The scorecards show the gap between funded and unfunded members, split by party, and never claim a vote was bought.

• The Stock trades pages parse every electronically filed periodic transaction report House members have submitted under the STOCK Act since 2021, straight from the House Clerk's PDFs. Paper filings (scans) are skipped. Members report each trade as a range, so rankings use the bottom of the range.
• Trades by spouses and dependent children are included because the law requires them to be reported. Tickers are grouped into the same industries as the money, by company name and a hand list of the most traded tickers, so the industry totals are a floor.
• Senators' filings are published only behind an agreement page on efdsearch.senate.gov and are not included yet.

• The Lobbying page uses the Senate's Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through the lda.gov API. For each industry it follows a hand list of the biggest companies and trade groups (the same names as the campaign money) and sums their quarterly reports: a hired firm's income from the client, or an in-house registrant's own expenses. Only the latest amendment of each quarter counts. Subsidiaries that file under other names are not included, so every figure is a floor.
• For each key vote, the site searches filings whose specific issues name the bill number or its short title in the year of the vote and the year before. The money shown is what those clients paid in the quarters they listed the bill, across everything they lobbied, so it is a ceiling for that one bill.
• The revolving door comes from the same filings: every lobbyist must list the government positions they held in the previous 20 years. The site sorts them into former members, former congressional staff and former executive-branch officials, and links an ex-staffer to the member they name. Only lobbyists in the filings this site pulled are counted, not all of K Street.

• Every donor tagged dark money is a nonprofit that does not have to disclose its own donors. For each one, the site looks up its IRS Form 990 filings in ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer by exact name (501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups only) and shows yearly revenue, spending and assets, with links to the PDFs. The 990 never names donors, which is why the trail ends there.
• Groups formed recently often have no 990 on file yet; the IRS gives them up to 17 months after their first tax year to file.

• The Ads page uses Google's political ads transparency bundle: weekly spend by every verified political advertiser on Google Search, YouTube and Google's display network. Only advertisers whose region includes the US are counted, and each week is assigned to the even-year election cycle it falls in or leads up to.
• Advertisers are matched to the super PACs, dark-money groups and candidates on this site by name (with a short alias list for groups like "HMP" and "CLF"). Unmatched advertisers, such as governors' races, ballot measures and companies, are listed separately.
• Meta's Ad Library has no comparable public file, so Facebook and Instagram spending is not included.

• Every super PAC and party committee that spent at least $1M, plus a handful of well-known ones, has to report who gave it money. Those gifts come from the FEC's individual-contributions file, which despite the name also lists companies, nonprofits and other PACs. Refunds are netted off and memo lines (which duplicate earmarked totals) are skipped.
• Gifts are grouped into one donor by surname and first name (so “Yass, Jeff Mr.” and “Yass, Jeff” are one person) or by organisation name with Inc/LLC stripped. Two different people with the same name would be merged; among donors of $250K or more this is rare, and the biggest names are checked by hand.
• A donor's money is scored the way the group that received it spent its money. If a group spent 80% of its outside money on candidates who lost, 80% of each donor's gift to it counts as lost. Money given to a group that has reported no outside spending is “not spent yet”. Groups also pay for staff, ads not aimed at a named candidate and transfers, so this is the best-case reading of what each dollar bought.
• “Dark money” marks nonprofits (typically 501(c)(4)s) that give to super PACs but do not have to disclose their own donors. Money from them cannot be traced further. Gifts from one PAC to another are shown as transfers; the original donor is one step upstream.

• The last pre-election FEC reports cover through Oct 14, 2026. Spending in the final weeks shows up in the post-election reports due in December, so 2026 totals will grow.
• Independent expenditures are reported several times (24- and 48-hour notices, then regular reports). We keep the latest version of each transaction, but some double counting may remain, so treat outside totals as close estimates.
• A few filings report impossible amounts (billions of dollars from unknown groups). Single lines over $50M are dropped as data-entry errors.
• The labels on well-known super PACs (for example Elon Musk behind America PAC) come from public reporting. The donor pages are built from the FEC filings themselves.
• Gifts to a super PAC are reported by the receiving committee, so money moved into a group in the last weeks before the election shows up only in the post-election reports.

• 2026 United States Senate elections (Wikipedia)
• 2026 United States House of Representatives elections (Wikipedia)
• FEC candidate summary (2025–2026)
• FEC committee summary (2025–2026)
• FEC independent expenditures (2025–2026)
• FEC contributions from committees to candidates (2025–2026)
• FEC committee master file (2025–2026)
• FEC individual contributions (2025–2026)
• Voteview roll-call data (UCLA), 117th–119th Congresses
• unitedstates/congress-legislators (Bioguide to FEC IDs)
• House Clerk periodic transaction reports (STOCK Act), 2021–2026
• IRS Form 990 filings via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer
• Google political ads transparency bundle (advertiser weekly spend)
• Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings (lda.gov REST API)
• Lobbyists' covered positions, from Senate LDA filings

To rebuild the data, run npm run campaigns:data. To pull fresh 2026 race calls, run npm run campaigns:results first. To refresh the donor layer, run npm run campaigns:donors (it downloads the FEC donor files, several GB each) and rebuild. The 2020 and 2022 ballots come from npm run campaigns:history. Roll-call votes are rebuilt with npm run campaigns:votes, stock trades with npm run campaigns:trades, lobbying and the revolving door with npm run campaigns:lobbying, the IRS filings with npm run campaigns:nonprofits and the Google ads with npm run campaigns:ads.