Big Money Donations

Donors who give over $200 to a politician during an election cycle are disclosed to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) along with information such as their address and employer.

The FEC makes that data available publicly on their website.

Then, the Center for Responsive Politics, through OpenSecrets.org, takes that information and makes it a bit more user friendly. It deduplicates and standardizes some of the inputs, so that if on one donation form, someone listed "Solomon Kahn" as their employer, and on another they listed "Solomon Kahn Inc." those donations would look the same.

Additionally, where possible, they link together companies and industries. So Goldman Sachs would be categorized in the Financial Sector, and Monsanto in Agribusiness.

All the donations you see in the chart above are from these itemized, big money donations. All the small money donations candidates receive are lumped together in one big "Small Money Donors" line item, as explained to the right.

In cases where the total for a cycle is negative, this is a result of refunding money from previous election cycles.

Independent Expenditures by Super Pacs on behalf of a candidate are included in their fundraising totals. Independent expenditures against opponents are not included by default, but can be included in the advanced options.

Non-contributions (in particular 24T contributions) are earmarked contributions where the funds come from an organizations treasury as opposed to an individual's direct contribution.

The data powering this is exported from OpenSecrets raw files into a postgres database. That database is open source and can be found here.