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Data sources
Everything here is built from public records that anyone can check. These are the exact datasets we use.
Candidate financial totals
How much each campaign raised, and how much of that came from individual donors, political action committees, and party committees.
openFEC — /candidate/{id}/totals/
Figures are reported by the campaigns themselves and filed with the Commission. We do not adjust them.
Independent expenditures
Money spent for or against a candidate by outside groups such as super PACs, which never passes through the campaign.
openFEC — /schedules/schedule_e/by_candidate/
We use the Commission's aggregated endpoint rather than summing individual rows. Raw rows include 24-hour notices and amended filings that would otherwise be counted twice.
Congressional roster
Who currently serves, in which chamber, and each member's Federal Election Commission identifier.
unitedstates/congress-legislators
Members are matched to filings by identifier, never by name. Anyone may file for office under any name, so names are not reliable identifiers.
What we do not yet use
Congressional voting records, industry classification of individual political action committees, and named individual donors are all planned. They are not on the site because we have not finished verifying them, and we do not publish data we cannot stand behind.
Copyright of the underlying data
Federal Election Commission data is produced by the United States government and is in the public domain. It belongs to everyone. Our writing, design and analysis are our own, but the underlying filings are yours as much as ours — which is rather the point.
Full detail on how we handle these sources is on our methodology page.