Understand the records

Follow the money. Keep the context.

GovMoneyGraph connects federal campaign-finance records so you can investigate who contributed, which committees received contributions, and how committees made disbursements. Here is how to read and cite what you find.

Federal records, not a claim of complete nationwide coverage

The current explorer uses Federal Election Commission data: candidate and committee records, reported contributions, disbursements, and filing information. A contributor’s state or city is their reported location; it does not mean we have ingested that state’s or city’s election filings.

Use the election-cycle selector to see the cycles loaded here. A cycle labeled 2026 covers 2025–2026. An available cycle does not guarantee every filing or dataset is complete. Check each page’s source notes, reporting period, and availability messages before comparing totals.

FEC data can change as new or amended reports are processed. Financial snapshots, itemized records and different schedules may have different coverage. Loading a page does not mean a new agency sync has just occurred.

Explore official FEC data · FEC bulk datasets

FEC terminology

Contributors and contributions: A contribution is money or anything of value provided to influence a federal election. We use “individual contributors” and “contributions,” not “giving” or “donations,” for these records.
Receipts: The broader incoming category reported by committees. Not every receipt is a contribution; for example, offsets to operating expenditures are also receipts.
Disbursements and operating expenditures: Disbursements are the broader outgoing category. Operating expenditures, contribution refunds and transfers are distinct categories, not interchangeable labels.
Recipient committee and payee: A recipient committee receives a contribution or transfer. A payee receives a disbursement. A candidate supported or opposed by an independent expenditure is not necessarily the payee.
Transactions and contributors: A transaction count counts reported records, not distinct people. A mixed list that includes refunds is labeled “transactions,” not a count of new contributions.

Definitions: FEC contributions · FEC receipts · FEC disbursements

“Reported transaction total,” identity groupings, industry classifications and party breakdowns describe GovMoneyGraph’s calculations or matching—not additional FEC reporting fields.

What the amounts mean

Reported totals versus itemized records: A filing’s cover-page total can include unitemized money and categories outside the displayed ledger. A short list or network is a preview, not the entire filing.
Net, gross and refunds: Read the metric label: net amounts can include negative adjustments or refunds. Contribution counts are not necessarily counts of distinct people. Dollar displays are rounded to whole dollars; underlying reported amounts retain cents.
Transfers and attribution: The same money can be reported at multiple stages, including a conduit, recipient or LLC attribution. Do not sum every connected node or a parent’s receipt and its attributed memo entries as separate new money.
Disbursements and operating expenditures: Contributions to other committees, operating expenditures and independent expenditures are different activities. A candidate named as the subject of an expenditure is not necessarily its payee.
Cash and noncash assets: A noncash bookkeeping offset does not by itself establish a cash payment back to a contributor. Disclosed assets and cash on hand are different measures; a contribution’s reported value is not a current market valuation.
Comparing cycles: Compare the same coverage window. An in-progress cycle is not comparable to a complete two-year cycle without adjusting the window. Core money amounts are reported nominal US dollars, not inflation-adjusted estimates.

Reported names, company groups and industries

Names and spellings can vary across filings. GovMoneyGraph groups reported aliases using normalization, matching evidence and reviewed mappings. A grouped contributor profile is not proof that every reported name is the same legal person. Inspect the original name, location, employer, occupation and filing when identity matters.

Employer pages aggregate contributions by people who reported that employer. That is not automatically a contribution from the company itself or an expression of its political position. Organization-contributor pages describe contributions reported under an organization name.

Industry labels are GovMoneyGraph’s classifications of employers and companies, not an FEC-reported industry field. Sources include company metadata, assisted classification and manual corrections. A company group can carry its reviewed classification across cycles. Retired, Homemaker, Unemployed and Not Reported are categories, not industries, and have different meanings.

Manual corrections and saved reviews affect the interpreted layer, not the underlying reported FEC values. Inspect source links and classification context when available; a model’s confidence score is not independent verification.

Browse employers · Explore industries & categories · Browse occupations

Party labels need evidence

FEC reported: party information in the source record.
Linked candidate: a relationship to a candidate with party information.
Curated classification: a reviewed organizational alignment tied to a specific FEC committee ID and a cited source, not calculated from transactions or asserted as an FEC-reported field.
Inferred from activity: an interpretation of reported political activity.
Derived from contributions: a breakdown based on recipients of contributions.

These are not interchangeable. Contributing to a recipient does not prove the contributor’s party registration, beliefs or endorsement. Unclassified means insufficient classification evidence, not necessarily independent or nonpartisan. A compliance signal is a prompt for investigation, not a finding of illegality.

A candidate’s reported party, or a committee’s reported or linked-candidate party, takes precedence over contribution patterns. When party is inferred from activity, we use affirmative support and outgoing contribution or transfer relationships—not the party labels of incoming contributors. Opposition spending remains a separate disclosure: opposing a Republican does not establish Democratic support, or vice versa. A primary can involve support and opposition to candidates of the same party.

Reviewed classifications—including WinRed’s Republican alignment and ActBlue’s Democratic alignment—remain fixed when transaction patterns change. They do not change the reported recipients or amounts, imply that every contributor shares the organization’s affiliation, or turn all PACs or labor unions into one party.

Background graph calculations carry complete party distributions, including unclassified activity, through eligible contribution and transfer relationships. A dominant display color never rounds a recipient’s full breakdown to one party. Circular transfers are solved together; a closed group without independent party evidence remains unclassified. Incoming contributors never redefine a candidate’s or committee’s party identity.

Reported party identity, incoming contributor alignment, and outgoing activity are separate measures. Multi-step alignment is a modeled interpretation of destinations, not verification that an original contributor’s exact dollars paid for a particular advertisement or reached a particular candidate. Evidence coverage is the classified share of the activity used by the model—not a probability of someone’s political beliefs or a claim that all finances are known.

Graph results are published as cycle-specific generations. Classification provenance includes the graph generation and evidence depth when available. The ten visible map connections are a display limit, not the universe used for classification. Older cached financial profiles may remain visible while a background refresh completes.

FEC independent expenditure support and opposition fields

Explore parties and relationship provenance

Make the finding reproducible

Choose an entity and election cycle, then inspect the relevant contributions, receipts or disbursements.
Check the metric, date range and whether a graph shows only the largest connections or a party-filtered subset.
Open the source filing for the underlying claim. Preserve the original record’s names and identifiers when ambiguity matters.
Share the cycle-specific page using its copy-link or citation control. Graph embed controls provide a link back to the source page.

Suggested attribution: Data: GovMoneyGraph, based on FEC records. Include the entity, election cycle, metric, reporting period when shown, page link, and access date. Totals and interpretations may change after amendments or corrections.

Use this research tool for transparency and analysis, not contributor solicitation. No paid subscription or account is needed for the public exploration links on this page.

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