NEW YORK – As a Washington journalist during the ’90s, I made frequent treks to the Federal Election Commission to inspect cabinets full of campaign finance reports to find out who was giving to whom.
Though some data were available through a proprietary online system, those $20-per-hour access fees added up. Candidates, meanwhile, had to be cajoled into providing data on disc – many flatly refused, while one responded to a colleague’s request with ancient 8-inch floppies that fit no modern computer.
Times have changed. I’m jealous of all the information available over the Internet – most of it for free. Even President Bush’s campaign site has a searchable database of his contributors. That doesn’t make finding data easy. But what’s out there is a welcome start.
There’s no matching the FEC’s own site for completeness – and confusion. In most cases, you get multiple ways to view data on contributors to House, Senate and presidential campaigns, political parties and special interest groups.
You can view PDF files or scanned images of paper reports, going as far back as 1993. Or you can view data as data – on-screen, or downloaded for viewing in a spreadsheet program like Excel.
This is great for serious analysis. But for the merely curious, the FEC site can be daunting.
Where should you even begin? Search for “Bush” and one result is “Bush Must Go!” – hardly the official campaign organ. As for John Kerry, is it “John Kerry for President,” “Kerry Victory 2004” or “Kerry-Edwards 2004”?
You can search for individual contributors by name, city, state, ZIP, employer or occupation, amount range or date range. But you can’t narrow your search to a specific candidate or race, so donations to the Socialist National Committee of Wisconsin are listed alongside those to Kerry or Bush. The best you can do is get non-searchable, alphabetical lists of donors to a specific campaign.
Two private Web sites, PoliticalMoneyLine.com and OpenSecrets.org, subject the FEC data to additional analyses. They get data dumps from the FEC periodically, so they are not as current as the FEC’s continuously updated site.
OpenSecrets lets you narrow donor searches by recipients. (At Bush’s site, you get only donors to his campaign, but you can’t search by ZIP code, occupation or employer, as you can at OpenSecrets.)
OpenSecrets is strong on graphs, charts and bonus information. You can learn, for instance, that in the “computers/Interent” industry, employees and others affiliated with Microsoft Corp. are the top contributors to various candidates, giving more than $2 million, 60 percent of it to Democrats.
OpenSecrets is well organized. Just click the “Who Gives” and “Who Gets” tabs to get started.
But PoliticalMoneyLine has much more to offer – often for a price. Data downloads run from $25 to $100 apiece. Databases on how candidates spend their money, something not even the FEC provides in a searchable format, are available only to subscribers of its $2,500-per-year FECInfoPro package.
Both PoliticalMoneyLine and OpenSecrets give you only limited data for free on so-called 527s, the organizations responsible for some independent ads, including the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry. For more, you need the FECInfoPro subscription.
Unfortunately, the Internal Revenue Service site isn’t that much better; you can view the 527 information as a PDF or download everything, but there’s no search tool.
For the dedicated snoop, Fundrace.org tells you which of your neighbors have given, to whom and how much.
Fundrace is a novelty. For serious research, you need a site that balances completeness, ease of use and free access.
My choice is OpenSecrets.org. It sure beats digging in a filing cabinet.
Associated Press
OpenSecrets uses graphs and charts to help inform users of campaign contributions.
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