Every number on this site is added up from public campaign finance filings. This page explains where the data comes from, what we do to it, what the totals mean, and where it falls short.
State campaign finance data is messy. Each state publishes in its own format, with its own codes and its own gaps. We try to be clear about what we changed, what we inferred, and what we could not fix.
Contributions, expenditures, candidates and committees come from each state's election or ethics agency, collected from the same bulk files and search tools the public can use. The exact sources for a state are listed in the Sources section at the bottom of its state, race and candidate pages.
One other source supplies money figures: the Federal Election Commission. Some groups that spend in state races report to the FEC instead of, or as well as, the state. Their spending, and the money behind it, appears in the independent spending figures on race and candidate pages. It is never added to a candidate's own Raised or Spent.
The rest only fill in details that state filings don't carry, and never change a dollar figure:
Some states publish bulk files we can download directly. Others only offer a search page, so a program runs the searches and saves the results, a method often called scraping. Each state has its own collector, and either way we keep what the state gave us unchanged.
A parser written for that state rewrites the raw files into one common layout: contributions, expenditures, candidates and committees. Names, dates and amounts are cleaned up, but the state's own codes are kept alongside. Every row keeps the name of the file it came from and its row number, so any figure can be traced back to the original filing.
Each state's data is checked automatically before it goes any further. A state fails the check if required fields such as amount, date or committee are missing or unreadable in more than 1% of rows. A state that fails is held back: the last version that passed stays on the site until the problem is fixed. Amounts above $10 million, dates out of range and malformed addresses are flagged for review.
States record money by committee, not by person. To show a candidate's totals we link each candidate to their own committee or committees, using the state's filer IDs where they exist and name matching where they don't. For the most prominent races, the links are reviewed by hand.
When a match is ambiguous, for example two committees or two candidates with the same name, we leave it unlinked. A missing link means money is left out of a candidate's total; a wrong link would put someone else's money in it. We prefer the first mistake to the second.
Each transaction is labeled by what kind of money it is (see below), totals are calculated, and the pages read from those totals. Each state is refreshed about once a week; a failure in one state does not block the others.
Not everything a committee reports receiving is a donation, and not everything it reports paying out is campaign spending. Counting it all would overstate both figures, in some states by a lot.
Raised counts contributions and public financing. It leaves out loans, interest and investment income, refunds and returned payments, and money a candidate moves between their own committees. Those are listed separately on the candidate page under Other receipts.
Spent leaves out payments that aren't spending on the campaign, such as buying investments, repaying loans, and refunding contributions. Those are shown separately as not counted.
Estimated cash on hand is simply Raised minus Spent for the period we cover. It is not the balance the campaign reports: it ignores money carried over from earlier years and loans. When the estimate comes out negative, which usually means the campaign is spending carried-over money or a loan, the page shows a dash instead.
Totals are added up from the individual transactions a state publishes. They can differ from the summary totals on a campaign's own report, most often because small donations below a state's itemizing threshold are reported as a lump sum or not listed at all.
The site currently covers the 2026 election cycle, using transactions dated from the start of 2025.
Each contribution is sorted into one of six groups:
| Individual | A person giving their own money. |
| Self-funding | The candidate's own money given to their own campaign. |
| Party | Party committees, including legislative caucus committees. |
| PAC & committees | Political action committees and other candidates' committees. |
| Other organizations | Businesses, unions, associations and anything else that is not a person or a registered committee. |
| Public funds | Public campaign financing paid by the state. |
States differ widely in how much they tell us about a donor. Some mark every donor's type; many only say "individual" or "not an individual"; a few say nothing. We decide the group in this order and stop at the first that gives an answer:
A donor we can't place goes into Other organizations. That means the first two steps are reliable, and the last two are judgments that can be wrong for an individual donor even when the overall split is sound.
Spending by outside groups for or against a candidate is shown separately and is never added to that candidate's own Raised or Spent. It comes from state filings and, for groups that report federally, from the Federal Election Commission. Some filings don't say whether the spending supported or opposed the candidate; we show those as unknown.
Where we can, we also show what these groups raised and who their biggest funders are. That money was given to the group, not to the candidate: the donor doesn't explicitly decide which race it is spent on, and it generally isn't subject to the limits that apply to donations made directly to a campaign.
By law, these groups may not coordinate with the candidates they support. We take them at their word and keep the money in separate columns. How independent it looks is up to you.
Every state's data has its own quirks. For each one we keep technical notes on what the state publishes, which rows we drop to avoid double-counting, how committees are tied to candidates, and the problems we know about. They are written for people working on the code, but they are the most detailed account of each state's data.
Notes for states that aren't on the site yet are in the same folder.
If a number looks wrong, please open an issue on GitHub with the page address and what you expected to see. The code that downloads and processes the data is public in the same place.