Follow the money
Trace where money comes from, where it goes, and how it is used.
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What was spent, for and against each party
The ten biggest independent spenders
Ranked by what they spent on candidate races. Party committees are left out: they do a different job, and they disclose their own donors. Pick a committee to see its chain.
In-party is the share of a committee's spending aimed at candidates of the party it was itself backing in that seat — a primary fight rather than a party one. A committee can be decisively one party's and still spend most of its money against that party's own candidates, which the side label alone cannot say.
One committee at a time
Where disclosure ends
On both sides, the largest single contributor to these committees is repeatedly not a person and not a committee, but an incorporated organisation — in several cases a 501(c)(4), a kind of non-profit that files no donor list at all. The contribution is public. Its source is not.
Listed because each is the largest organisation contribution on record for that committee, not because anything about any of them is irregular. Giving through a 501(c)(4) is lawful and both parties' committees are funded this way.
If you have not looked at campaign money before
Almost all of the money on this page is spent by organisations that are not the candidate’s campaign. The words for them are confusing, and the differences between them are the whole subject, so they are worth ten lines.
A committee
The legal name for any group that raises or spends money to influence a federal election, and the reason everything here is called one. A candidate’s own campaign is a committee. So is a party. So is every kind of PAC. They register with the Federal Election Commission and file regular public reports of what came in and what went out. If a group is a committee, you can read its books.
A PAC
A political action committee gives money to candidates. It is capped — only a few thousand dollars per candidate per election, a figure the FEC resets each cycle — and it is usually attached to a company, a union or a trade association, which the filings call its connected organisation.
A super PAC
Created by court decisions in 2010. It may raise unlimited sums from individuals, companies and unions, and in exchange it may not give a penny to a candidate. It spends on its own account instead: advertising for or against named candidates, which the law calls an independent expenditure and requires it to report. That reporting is why this page can say a committee spent money against somebody — the filer ticks a box saying support or oppose. A hybrid PAC runs both kinds of account side by side.
A 501(c)(4)
A non-profit, named after its section of the tax code, that is not a political committee. It may give to a super PAC. It does not have to say who gave to it. When people say “dark money” this is usually what they mean, and it is where this page’s trail stops most often.
Independent, in theory
A super PAC may not coordinate its spending with the candidate it is helping. What the filings show is who spent and on whom — not who spoke to whom. Nothing here can tell you whether that line held.
Three numbers, and where each comes from
A committee that spends money on a race files a report saying how much it took in. It does not file one saying who is behind the people who gave it. Putting those two facts next to each other is the whole exercise:
- What it spent, for and against each candidate, from the FEC's transaction files. An expenditure coded 24A is money spent against someone, and is counted that way — most of the money on this page was spent attacking a candidate rather than promoting one.
- What it received in total, from the FEC's own summary of each committee's reports.
- How much of that came from another registered committee, which is the only part that can be followed a further step, because a registered committee has to file too.
The gap between the second and third is the interesting part. It is not one thing: a named person who gave $10M is completely disclosed, and a limited company that gave $10M is a name with nothing behind it.
How “who it helps” is counted
Most of this money was spent attacking somebody, so a count of who each committee supported would miss the point — Senate Leadership Fund would read as a $10.7M committee. A dollar spent against a candidate is counted as help for the other side of that race.
With one exception, which matters: an attack does not always cross party lines. A committee that spends against a candidate of the party it is itself backing in that seat is fighting a primary, not the other party. In 2024 Make America Great Again Inc. spent $23.2M against Ron DeSantis and $9.9M against Nikki Haley; that is $33.2M of Republican money aimed at Republicans, and reading it as help for Democrats — which the first version of this page did — is simply wrong. It matters more in 2026, where the primaries are most of the money so far. Each panel says how much of the spending was intra-party.
What we cannot see, and why
Everything on this page comes from what the law requires to be filed. That is a great deal, and it stops abruptly in several places. None of the following is a gap in the data gathering; each is a place where no one is obliged to answer.
Who funds a 501(c)(4). The largest single contribution to several committees here came from one, and its own donors are not disclosed to anyone. We can name the organisation and the amount. We cannot name the people behind it, and neither can anybody else without the organisation’s consent.
Small donors, individually. Contributions below the itemisation threshold are reported as a lump sum, not a list of names. That is a deliberate privacy protection, and it means a committee funded by many small gifts looks less traceable here than one funded by a few large ones, without being less transparent.
State and local races. The FEC covers federal office only: President, the Senate and the House. Money in a governor’s race, a state legislature, a mayoralty or a judicial election is filed with the state, in fifty different systems, and none of it is here.
Whether anyone coordinated. See above. The filings record transactions, not conversations.
Spending that never names a candidate. Advertising about an issue, rather than for or against a named person, largely falls outside these reports. So does most organising, polling and persuasion that is not bought media.
The current cycle, completely. Committees file on a schedule, so a cycle in progress is always partly reported — most 2026 committees have reported only through 30 June 2026. The 2024 figures are final; the 2026 ones will grow.
What any of it achieved. This is a record of spending, not of effect. Our own testing found that campaign money, including money known before election day, does not improve a forecast of who wins a House seat once incumbency and the district’s lean are accounted for. Money going somewhere is evidence that somebody thought a race was worth contesting. It is not evidence that it worked.
Sources
FEC bulk downloads: committee master (cm), candidate master (cn), committee-to-candidate contributions (pas2), committee-to-committee transactions (oth), PAC and party summary (webk), for the 2024 and 2026 cycles. Largest contributions from the FEC's Schedule A API. Public-domain US government data throughout.
How names are matched. Filings are not keyed to a person, so this page treats every spelling of one name from one state as one donor. Somebody who gives from two addresses is therefore counted twice, and an individual total here can be lower than what that person actually gave. A contributor that is itself a committee is matched by name only when a single registered committee uses it. Totals count itemised filings only. Money given through a conduit such as ActBlue or WinRed is counted for the committee the donor chose rather than for the conduit. The FEC's bulk files also omit a small number of filings its own website serves, so treat every figure as a floor.