FEC Operating Expenditures
When a campaign or PAC writes a check, they have to report it to the FEC. This dataset is the complete record of those checks from 2008 onward. You can see exactly which vendors got paid, where they're located, what they were paid for, and which campaign paid them. A consulting firm might have worked with dozens of campaigns across different cycles. A media buyer might show up in thousands of records. This is how you trace money flow through the political ecosystem and see who's doing business with whom.
- Source rows:
- 17,629,946
- Coverage:
- 1201-04-02T00:00:00Z – 9201-12-02T00:00:00Z
CSV: all rows from “enriched”.
Table filters, sorting and pagination are not included.
Explore data
Views organize this dataset for different questions.
Loading views…
Enriched
Operating expenditures with FEC memo sub-itemizations removed and the spending committee resolved to its name, type, designation, party, connected organization, and, for candidate committees, the candidate's name, office, state, and district. Default view; use it for any spending total or vendor ranking.
View defined in OpenData · Source: fec
Dataset overview
This overview is independent of the table. Table selections and filters do not change it.
Questions this data answers
- Which vendors received the most payments from a specific campaign or PAC?
- How has a particular consulting firm's activity across political campaigns changed over election cycles?
- Which states and cities have the largest concentrations of political vendor activity?
- What types of expenses (consulting, media, travel, etc.) dominated spending in a given election cycle?
Download
CSV: all rows from “enriched”.
Table filters, sorting and pagination are not included.
Columns
36 columns in this table.