For those of you who don’t keep up with these things (yes, it’s possible there are other events going on in the world), yesterday was the deadline for organizations to file their lobbying reports for the fourth quarter of 2013.

The reports include lobbying expenditures and information about what bills were being lobbied and who was working on the accounts. Sounds pretty antiseptic, right? But the first step to success for a lobbyist is getting in the door of a decisionmaker’s office, whether physically or virtually. And nothing oils the hinges better than campaign contributions. The donations come not just from clients — Boeing, Google, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to name a few — but from the lobbyists themselves.

Not only do individual lobbyists make donations, but many lobbying firms have their own corporate PACs, to which employees (including the lobbyists who work there) contribute. In fact, lobbying is its own industry on our website.

One of these firms has remained among the top three in contributions since OpenSecrets.org started tracking these gifts in the 1990 election cycle.

Which brings us to this week’s Politiquizz question:

Which lobbying firm has remained as one of the top three contributors since 1990, and how much more did the firm’s employees and PAC contribute in the 2012 cycle than in the 1990 one?

The first person to submit the entire correct answer to [email protected] will win a free OpenSecrets.org bumper sticker. The answers can be found somewhere on our website. Happy searching!

In our last Politiquizz , we asked:

In 2013, what three industries within the agribusiness sector were the top spenders on lobbying?

Congratulations to Jason from Gerber, Calif., who was the first to respond with the correct answer: 1.) Agricultural Services 2.) Food Processing 3.) Tobacco

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