RELEASE NOTES

What's new on OpenPolitical

Every shipped change with the reason it matters to your work. 29 entries total.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 68 new expenditures ($37K in spend activity not previously captured) and 1,426 new contributions ($58K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through 2026-05-25.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 13 new expenditures ($1K in spend activity not previously captured) and 0 new contributions ($0 in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through 2026-05-21.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 61 new expenditures ($83K in spend activity not previously captured) and 3,704 new contributions ($178K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through 2026-05-25.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed: 2 days closer to today

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 535 new expenditures ($504K in spend activity not previously captured) and 3,147 new contributions ($807K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data freshened from 2025-07-21 through 2026-05-27 — a 2-day jump on the most-recent activity visible in the platform.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 116 new expenditures ($47K in spend activity not previously captured) and 1,007 new contributions ($585K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through 2026-05-22.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 0 new expenditures ($0 in spend activity not previously captured) and 185 new contributions ($1.8M in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through (none in this batch).

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

2w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 47 new expenditures ($57K in spend activity not previously captured) and 0 new contributions ($0 in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through 2026-05-25.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

3w ago

Fresh Texas data landed: 4 days closer to today

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 170 new expenditures ($49K in spend activity not previously captured) and 562 new contributions ($719K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data freshened from 2025-07-06 through 2026-05-25 — a 4-day jump on the most-recent activity visible in the platform.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

3w ago

Fresh Texas data landed

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 0 new expenditures ($0 in spend activity not previously captured) and 3 new contributions ($13K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data refreshed through (none in this batch).

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

3w ago

Fresh Texas data landed: 2 days closer to today

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 163 new expenditures ($893K in spend activity not previously captured) and 252 new contributions ($3.3M in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data freshened from 2024-07-10 through 2026-05-21 — a 2-day jump on the most-recent activity visible in the platform.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

3w ago

Fresh Texas data landed: 4 days closer to today

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 8,104 new expenditures ($37.7M in spend activity not previously captured) and 78,842 new contributions ($37.8M in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data freshened from 2025-07-11 through 2026-05-19 — a 4-day jump on the most-recent activity visible in the platform.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

4w ago

Fresh California data landed: 12 days closer to today

Tonight's CA data ingestion added 1,978 new expenditures ($69.2M in spend activity not previously captured) and 4,525 new contributions ($55.8M in donor activity). Coverage of CA expenditure data freshened from 2026-05-04 through 2026-05-14 — a 10-day jump on the most-recent activity visible in the platform. The full snapshot is 1.34M committees, 689K filings, 19.36M contributions, 15.10M expenditures, 695K independent expenditures.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back a near-real-time edge. A CA campaign that hired a new vendor between May 5 and May 14 now shows up correctly on their tech-stack spider. Previously you would have been looking at a stale picture.

/research?jurisdiction=state-CA — search any CA committee and watch the 3 mo window on the Sankey now show activity through mid-May.

4w ago

California data refreshes itself now, weekly

California's full state campaign-finance dataset now refreshes automatically every week. The cleanup pipeline (amendment supersede logic, blank-date fallback, sentinel validation) runs end-to-end without manual hand-off, and the freshest numbers land directly on every CA profile.

CA data was the tech stack's single biggest staleness risk — for a 90-day window of activity, even a 3-week lag means 30% of the rendered timeline is wrong. The new pipeline refreshes weekly without human touch. When a CA campaign hires a new vendor on Monday, you see it in the spider on Sunday — not next quarter.

/data-updates — see the green timestamp for "California state" and the per-run delta showing what landed last refresh.

4w ago

Fresh Texas data landed: 7 days closer to today

Tonight's Texas refresh pulled the current bulk dump and merged it into the platform. 911 new expenditures ($746K in spend activity not previously captured) and 5,274 new contributions ($874K in donor activity). Coverage of Texas expenditure data freshened from 2022-07-29 through 2026-05-15 — a 7-day jump on the most-recent activity visible in the platform.

Every campaign-tech-stack visualization for Texas filtered by "last 90 days" just gained back its near-real-time edge. Texas campaigns that hired a new vendor in the last week now show up correctly on their tech-stack spider.

/research?jurisdiction=state-TX or any Texas campaign profile.

4w ago

Agency contacts now show the buyer tier, not just leadership

Vendor profiles now split agency contacts into two sections:

- Operators & buyers (shown first) — Account Directors, Media Buyers, Senior Strategists, Directors of Digital. The people who actually make day-to-day vendor calls.
- Leadership — Founders, Partners, Chiefs. For strategic / partnership conversations.

Junior contacts (Associates, Coordinators) hide behind a disclosure unless you expand them. The radial spider graph also surfaces operators first.

For a $14M agency like FP1 or Targeted Victory, the CEO doesn't take vendor calls — the Director of Media does. Pitching the operator tier closes more deals than pitching leadership and waiting for an intro. We surfaced 9 operators across the top 20 vendors so far: FP1's media buyers, Mothership's strategists, RWT's production managers, Aisle 518's managing strategist. Each one is a direct outreach target, not a relationship-building target.

FP1 Strategies — see Holly Horan (Senior Media Buyer) + Ryan Gracy (Director, Media Buyer) in the Operators section above the leadership grid. Or Mothership Strategies for the digital-strategy side.

4w ago

Tech stack: time toggle, gold/silver/bronze tiers, cleaned categorization

Three upgrades to the campaign tech-stack spider:

1. 3 mo / 6 mo / 12 mo toggle — same pill UI as the Sankey. Switch windows to see how a campaign's stack evolves (a 3-mo→6-mo→12-mo flip on Ossoff's stack instantly shows which vendor categories filled in recently vs. which were already locked).
2. Unified gold/silver/bronze/lapsed tier scheme — replaces the opaque "Foundational/Established/Active" labels with a simple cycle-count rule that's the same on the spider AND /research. Gold = 3+ cycles & active; silver = 2 cycles & active; bronze = single cycle (new); lapsed = was multi-cycle but stale. No dollar thresholds, no black box.
3. Vendor category override layer — surgical fix for misclassifications (Intuit pinned to Software & Tech instead of Legal; Delta/UHC/Amazon/banks/telcos excluded from stack views entirely since they're not political-services vendors). Combined manual + LLM (V4 Flash) pass currently re-pinning ~4,600 stack-eligible vendors.

A spider that mislabels Intuit as a Legal vendor is a spider you stop trusting. Categorization integrity is the difference between "useful planning artifact" and "polished-looking but wrong." The override layer makes accuracy fixable in seconds (one row in vendor_category_override) instead of waiting on a full re-classification pass over 8.4M disbursements.

Ossoff — toggle the 3/6/12 mo pills, watch the gold-tier vendors hold steady (long-term anchors) while bronze vendors come and go (newer relationships).

4w ago

Top trusted vendors widget on the dashboard

New widget on /dashboard: the 10 vendors with the most active Tier-1 (multi-cycle) committee relationships in the last 90 days, filtered to operator-targetable categories. Surfaces who's actually winning the political services market right now — not who has the loudest reputation.

When you're trying to position against the market, you want to know which firms have the deepest current relationships, not which ones won awards five years ago. The list updates as committees ship new spend — Elias Law Group, NGP VAN, Aristotle, AxCapital, CMDI: durable relationships, real-time visibility.

/dashboard — scroll past the call list to the "Top trusted vendors right now" panel.

4w ago

Campaign tech stack: now a spider, not a grid

The campaign tech stack visualization upgraded from a 13-card grid to a double-sided spider graph. Candidate at center, 8 strategic categories radiating out as legs (4 left, 4 right), each terminating in a label "rack" with 2 vendor bricks. Trusted (★ multi-cycle) bricks are highlighted; empty slots show as dashed-outline placeholders. A muted "supporting categories" strip below covers the 4 non-strategic buckets.

A grid of cards reads like an inventory. A spider reads like a system. You see Aisle 518 anchoring the Digital leg, MVAR holding Media, NGP VAN running Software — and instantly clock the empty Field slot as the prospect opportunity. The shape of the stack is itself information, not just a label on a cell.

Jon Ossoff (S-GA) shows a mature 8-leg stack with 11 trusted vendors visible. Compare to Mike Rogers (S-MI) for a sparser GOP-side build.

4w ago

Campaign tech stack on every profile

Every campaign profile now shows the campaign's tech stack — a 13-cell grid laying out the top 1-2 vendors in each service category (Media, Digital, Strategy, Fundraising, Software, Print/Mail, Field, Legal, etc.) over the last 90 days. Multi-cycle vendors are marked with a ★ "trusted" badge; current-cycle-only vendors are marked "new"; empty cells are flagged as gaps.

This is the BuiltWith-for-campaigns view operators actually think in. Scan a campaign's stack and instantly see where you'd fit. Empty Digital cell on a heavy-media campaign? That's a digital agency's pitch sitting on the screen. ★-marked vendors are locked-in incumbents — skip those. New vendors are the vulnerable relationships worth competing for.

Jon Ossoff (S-GA) — 10/12 categories filled, 14 trusted vendors visible. Or Mike Rogers (S-MI) for the GOP-side view.

4w ago

Agency contact enrichment is live

Every top-100 political vendor profile now shows the senior people who work at the agency — name, title, location (where known), LinkedIn URL, and pattern-inferred email — rendered as a green hub-and-spoke contact graph plus an iPhone-style contact-card grid below.

Skip the campaign-by-campaign hunt for the right operator. When you're researching Mission Control or AL Media, you see exactly who at the agency handles ad buys, finance, or strategy — and how to reach them — without contacting twelve separate campaigns to surface the same media buyer. One agency conversation usually beats five campaign ones.

Targeted Victory · AL Media · Liftoff Campaigns · MissionWired · Thematic Campaigns

4w ago

Time-window toggles on every profile chart

Sankey diagrams, top-vendors fans, top-payers fans, and category bars on campaign + vendor profiles all gained a 12 mo / 6 mo / 3 mo toggle. Switching windows re-syncs both sides of the Sankey so "money in" and "money out" cover the same time frame.

Cycle-to-date totals hide what's hot now. Toggle to 3 mo and you see who a campaign is actually paying this quarter — that's the prospect list for retention pitches, not the historical 12-month aggregate. Saves you from pitching a vendor that quietly left the account 8 months ago.

Open any vendor or campaign profile and click the 3 mo pill on the Sankey or fan. The shorter window changes which vendors lead.

4w ago

Deep-linkable profile sections

Every section on a campaign or vendor profile (Sankey, contacts, category bars, recent activity, race context, etc.) now has a stable anchor URL. Hover any section header to reveal a # link you can copy.

Share the exact view with a colleague. Instead of pasting a profile URL and saying "scroll down to the spending breakdown," you can paste /vendors/al-media#section-spend_by_category and they land on the chart you mean.

Hover any section header on a profile and click the # icon that appears on the right. Then bookmark or share that URL.

1mo ago

Readability overhaul for long research sessions

Three readability tiers shipped: a defensive-baseline pass that lifts contrast and tightens font sizing on /research, an opt-in "Larger text" toggle that persists across visits, and an AAA-contrast pass on every muted-text element platform-wide.

Operators spend hours in /research. If you're over 40 — or just tired of squinting at tiny gray text — the larger-text mode is a one-click upgrade that the platform remembers next time you log in. The defaults are now WCAG AAA, not "designer-pretty."

Visit /research and find the Larger text toggle. Or just notice the muted "rendered at" / "filing date" labels — they're readable now.

1mo ago

Unified right-edge slideout on /research

Filtering, purpose-tag preferences, and column controls used to be scattered across three different places on /research. They now live in a single right-edge tabbed slideout that opens with one click.

Less hunting. Your muscle memory works the same on every search — controls live in one consistent spot, and the slideout stays out of the way until you need it.

Open /research and click the tab on the right edge of the screen. Three tabs: filters, purposes, preferences.

1mo ago

Vendor profile reads left → right

Vendor profile hub-and-spoke fan flipped so the buyers (committees that pay the vendor) sit on the left and the vendor sits on the right. Matches the money-flow reading direction. Also renamed "Top paying committees" → Top buyers because that's what operators actually call them.

You scan the page once and instantly see who's paying — no mental remapping required. Cuts the time-to-insight on any vendor profile.

Mission Control, AL Media, Targeted Victory

1mo ago

One unified /research table: Schedule B + E together

Independent expenditures (Schedule E) used to live in a separate table you had to switch to. They're now folded into the main /research table alongside Schedule B disbursements. Schedule is now a filter, not a separate page. Tiered relationship badges + a vendor-stack tooltip help you spot strong relationships at a glance.

See an agency's full picture in one query — paid work AND who's running independent expenditures for or against the same candidates. Previously you had to run two searches and reconcile mentally. CSV export and column density were also restored from the recent refactor.

/research — try a candidate name or vendor and look for the IE rows mixed in. Hover a relationship badge to see the vendor breakdown.

1mo ago

Independent-expenditure history goes back to 2010

Federal Schedule E (independent expenditures by PACs / super PACs) backfilled from a sparse 1,136 rows to 668,626 rows covering 2010 through 2026. That's 16 years of PAC spending — for or against — every federal candidate.

When you're researching a vendor or campaign, the IE history is what tells you how loyal the money is. Cross-cycle PAC spending patterns surface durable agency relationships and reveal who quietly backed a candidate before the press caught on.

Search any vendor with PAC clients on /research. The historical IE rows appear in the unified table going back to 2010.

1mo ago

Atlas is now the homepage

The OpenPolitical homepage is now an interactive cartogram of national political spending — every state sized by spend, timeline scrubber going back 4+ years, scenario annotations explaining the notable shifts. Click any state to deep-link into /research filtered to that state.

Before you drill into a specific race or vendor, see the national context. Where is money concentrating right now? Which states are heating up? Atlas is the answer-at-a-glance that frames every deeper question.

openpolitical.com — scrub the timeline, click any state.

1mo ago

Dashboard data-freshness banner

The dashboard now shows the same "data last updated" banner as /research — green timestamp visible at the top of every page, with one click to see the full update history at /data-updates.

Trust signal. You always know how stale the numbers are before you act on them. No more wondering whether the cash-on-hand figure is from this week or last quarter.

/dashboard — banner sits right under the header. Click the timestamp for the full ingest log.