People have asked me to supply sources I have used to track Presidential campaign contributions so they can conduct their own investigations. As I wrote awhile ago, when i visited Iowa a friend did not want to know about the candidate’s positions on issues, she wanted to know “Who had bought them,” as she put it.

Let us begin with where the data come from and what is in these reports. Every Presidential candidate is required to file a monthly finance report by the Federal Election Commission. There is usually about a one month lag between the data in the report and their official release by the Commission. Here is a screen shot of the infamous line 17 of a federal election report filed by Hillary Clinton. Line 17 lists individual contributors.

Note the data on this page. We have the name of the contributor, their address, their employer, their area of employment, the date of the contribution and the amount. If you have the stamina you can go to the FEC site and call up the reports for each candidate and examine all the individual donors listed on line 17. The FEC makes things a bit easy in that the contributors are alphabetized, but there is no way, for example, to track how many people from “x” corporation gave money.

This is where the agregator sites come in. They actually take the time to go through these data and break it down by corporation, amount, etc. There are several of these sites. The one I use the most often is run by the Center for Responsive Politics: opensecrets.org. Another site that uses opensecrets data but connects it with voting records and other policy information is Project Vote Smart.

Other useful sites include the Campaign Finance Information Center, finance sites run by the Washington Post and New York Times plus the Congressional Quarterly’s Money Line.

If you really want to dig into individual contributors there also is a website, Fundrace that actually lets you research these individual contributions, so you can enter the name of a company or an occupation (actor) and see who are the donors. Check out which candidates your boss might be supporting or the person in the next cubicle or your neighbor.

There is one part of this that has a certain 1984ish quality about it, especially when you start looking up people you know or famous people. You can look up data on Fundrace by city. In fact there are even maps for every geographic area like ones you use to find restaurants or car repair shops, only these maps have little red and blue dots on them for donors. The bigger the dot, the bigger the donor. Just like those maps you can zoom in on your block to see who is contributing and how much. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these since I know friends and neighbors who have contributed but do not show up on the map.

These databases have created a boom industry for reporters who want to write about which candidates Hollywood celebrities are supporting and how much they have given them. Bette Middler and Ben Stiller are Hillary Clinton donors. Michael Douglas and Paul Newman gave to Chris Dodd. After Dodd dropped out Newman gave to Obama. Then to cover his bets, he and his wife Joanne Woodward gave to Hillary Clinton.

If the scary part is how it pinpoints even the smallest donor (a mail carrier in a townhouse near me gave $200 to Obama), it also is helping to lift a veil secrecy over campaign finance. This is especially true of the big donors. The more we can lift that veil, the more the true nature of each candidate’s donors stands revealed before us. And if you are like my friend from Iowa you can know who is supplying the money for each candidate.

Tagged with: campaign contributors • campaign finance • federal election commission • Goldman Sachs • Hillary Clinton • impact of campaign contributions • new-york-times • opensecrets.org • Washington-Post