Wall Street and financial interests spend huge sums of money trying to get their way in Washington. During the current election cycle, they have already poured more than $800 million into campaign contributions and federal lobbying. That works out to about $1.5 million a day.

On the campaign spending side of the ledger, finance is the runaway leader, with $245 million in donations reported through June 2014. In fact, no other economic sector even comes close. (The also-rans include health, at $86 million, and communications/electronics, at $63 million.)

When it comes to lobbying, financial interests had expended, through March, nearly $560 million – a total surpassed only by the $612 million spending of the health industry and the $613 million associated with a category of “miscellaneous business” companies and associations, which includes groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that also lobby on financial issues. (These and many other figures can be found in “Wall Street Money in Washington,” a new Americans for Financial Reform report that draws on data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.)

In both categories, the industry is on track to equal or exceed its expenditures in the 2010 election cycle, when the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was making its way through Congress. That’s because financial reform remains a battle zone; more than four years after the passage of Dodd-Frank, many rules have yet to be written, and the industry is still pressing hard to repeal, water down or delay provisions of the law and to forestall further proposals for change.

Where does the money go? Much of it winds up in the campaign warchests of candidates for national office, with 62 percent going to Republicans and 38 percent to Democrats. The biggest recipients are incumbent members of Congress, especially those with leadership positions or seats on the two main financial oversight committees. In the House of Representatives, the top 20 beneficiaries of financial-industry largesse include Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and 10 of his committee colleagues:

Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

Jim Himes, D-Conn.

Scott Garrett, R-N.J.

Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.

Ed Royce, R-Calif.

Gary Peters, D-Mich.

Steve Stivers, R-Ohio

Randy Neugebauer, R-Texas

Patrick McHenry, R-N.C.

Three – Cotton, Capito and Peters – are candidates for the Senate this year.

[ READ: Congress Is Enabling Bad Corporate Citizens]

All told, members of the Financial Services Committee have collected an average of $408,671 from the financial industry in the current election cycle, compared to a $186,242 average for the House as a whole – a wide gap, which possibly helps account for the steady stream of Wall Street-friendly bills that have come out of the committee lately.

In the Senate, the discrepancy between Banking Committee members (average take $448,667) and the chamber as a whole (average take $423,413) is much smaller; and it’s worth noting that the committee has not taken up any of the deregulatory bills pushed in the House. Just the same, five members of the Banking Committee have made the financial industry’s top 15 senators list: Mark Warner, D-Va., Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Pat Toomey, R-Pa., Kay Hagan, D-N.C., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. (Warner and Hagan are running for re-election this year.)

Another big chunk of Wall Street change pays for the salaries and day-to-day activities of the more than 2,000 registered lobbyists working on behalf of the nation’s banks, investment advisers, financial companies and related trade associations. Many are former regulators, lawmakers, or congressional staffers, who can expect to be well-compensated for the expertise and relationships they bring to the task.

And the official expenditures don’t tell the whole story. To begin with, they exclude a great deal of money spent on activities (including research, communications, office administration and legal work) intended either to influence political outcomes directly or to get positions based on narrow industry self-interest treated as serious policy arguments.

Nor do they cover the seven-figure paychecks of people like Scott O’Malia, the newly named CEO of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. O’Malia, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was until a few weeks ago a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency chiefly responsible for regulating the industry he now represents.

At the CFTC, O’Malia gained a reputation as an aggressive champion of the swaps dealers’ relentless efforts to keep much of their opaque business from being moved onto regulated and transparent exchanges. That record no doubt helped make him an attractive candidate to lead what the headlines reporting his appointment routinely described as a “lobbying” group. Nevertheless, O’Malia will probably not have to register as a lobbyist. (By law, he is barred from having any direct dealings with the CFTC for the next two years.) The International Swaps and Derivatives Association has not said how much money O’Malia will make, but his predecessor’s salary, according to Bloomberg, was $1.8 million a year.

With all this financial-sector money flooding in, it’s no wonder that financial reform remains a contentious topic in Washington. There would be much less opposition, though, if some of our elected officials did a better job of listening to their constituents, since the voters are remarkably united on these issues. Across lines of geography, party, age and race, Americans overwhelmingly support stronger oversight of Wall Street and the financial industry. Nearly four out of five voters (78 percent), according to recent polling conducted by Lake Research on behalf of AFR and the Center for Responsible Lending, agree that financial rules and enforcement should be strengthened, and that Wall Street’s bad practices have not changed enough.

Americans are troubled not only by the financial sector’s business practices, but by its political power. Four-fifths of the voters surveyed in the poll voiced concern about the influence of Wall Street financial companies on elected officials. (84 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of independents, and 74 percent of Republicans identified with that sentiment.) More than half (55 percent) said they would be less likely to vote for a congressional candidate known to have received large donations from big banks and financial companies, as opposed to just 13 percent who said they would be more likely to vote for such a candidate. (Another 31 percent said neither.)

Money needs to have less influence in Washington. This is a larger cause that, like financial reform, would go better with more disclosure (and public awareness) of the many specific ways in which money is used to benefit Wall Street at the expense of regular people and businesses.