ABOUT · OPENPOLITICAL

A primary-source view of American campaign finance.

Three jurisdictions live in closed beta — federal, California, Texas. Every dollar on the site traces back to a publicly-filed disclosure, with a one-click link to the source filing. No paraphrase, no aggregation we can't show our work on.

What we're building

A working tool for the people who actually deal with campaign finance professionally — media buyers, finance directors, compliance counsel, opposition researchers, party-committee staff, journalists on the money beat. Not a news site. Not a leaderboard for general audiences.

The premise is simple: campaign-finance disclosures are public, but they're scattered across a federal regulator and 50 state agencies, formatted inconsistently, and almost never linked to each other. We pull them, canonicalize vendor identities across filings, resolve people across committees, and present the result as profiles — one page per vendor, filer, campaign, and (where confidence allows) person — connected by an explorable network.

What's in the data, today

Federal
FEC
Federal Election Commission bulk + RAD · 1990 to present
State · largest
California SoS
Cal-Access · committees, filings, expenditures, contributions
State
Texas TEC
Texas Ethics Commission · campaign finance filings

How we know what we know

Every disbursement row carries a source-filing ID, a retrieval timestamp, and a content hash. Vendors are canonicalized into a single profile per real entity using a combination of name normalization, address overlap, and human review for the high-volume tail. People are tier-tagged — verified / probable / name-match-only — and low-confidence matches are shown with their evidence so operators can judge for themselves.

Refresh cadence Refreshed weekly from primary sources. Campaign-finance filings don't move minute by minute — weekly is what's true and what's sustainable. Federal API delta jobs (candidate totals, IE filings) run more often (daily / every 4h) so race-level numbers stay current between bulk drops.

What's not here, and what's coming

Closed beta

Access is invite-only while we get the data layer + canonicalization right. If you're a working operator on the money side of American politics and want in, email [email protected] with a one-liner about what you'd use it for.

Disagree with something we have wrong? Found a vendor merge that's actually two distinct firms? Flag it — that feedback is the most valuable input we get.

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