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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.
Bundled (earmarked) contributions
Individual donations that an organization collected and directed to a named candidate. Legally individual money, so it never appears in a PAC total.
openFEC—/schedules/schedule_a/, the Commission's earmark attributions
Counted only for organizations we have swept so far, which the methodology page lists. Repeated amounts from amended filings are de-duplicated before publishing.
Committee classifications
Whether each giving committee belongs to a corporation, trade association, labor union, or membership organization—and the parent organization's name.
FEC bulk data—committee master file (cm)
The classification is the Commission's own. The industry names layered on top of it are ours, and the full mapping is published on the methodology page.
Roll-call votes
Every recorded floor vote, per member, in both chambers.
clerk.house.gov roll-call XML; senate.gov roll-call XML
House records identify members by their official bioguide id; Senate records use LIS ids mapped through the public roster. Votes are matched on those identifiers.
What each bill is about
Each voted-on bill's policy area, and the Congressional Research Service's plain-English summary of what it does.
govinfo.gov bulk data—BILLSTATUS
Policy areas are assigned by the Library of Congress, one per bill, so no bill is selected by us to make a point. CRS summaries are quoted word for word.
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. Anyone may file for office under any name they like, which makes names useless for matching—a lesson we learned the hard way.
Zip code to congressional district
Which district each zip code sits in, powering the library's zip search.
US Census Bureau—2020 ZCTA to 119th Congressional District relationship file
The Census maps its own approximation of each zip, so the match is close but not official, and a zip that crosses a district line shows every district it touches. PO-box-only zips have no Census area and return no match.
What we do not yet use
Named individual donors are not published. State-level campaign finance (governors, state legislatures) is not covered: no federal source holds it, and the licensing terms on the main private source don’t allow a public site to republish it. We also don’t use lobbying disclosures to pick bills, because most filers never name the bills they lobby on, and the gaps would make silence look like innocence.
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.
Full detail on how we handle these sources is on our methodology page.