Campaign finance is simultaneously one of the least understood and most important aspects of modern politics. As anyone who has run for office or worked on a campaign will tell you, money is the lifeblood of any campaign. Unless you are fantastically wealthy or running in a very small race, there is only so much you can bootstrap yourself.
The decision to fund—or not fund—a campaign can have a profound impact on its ultimate success. Yet relatively little is understood about how all of that money moves through the maze of campaigns, donors, PACs, political parties, and independent expenditure groups that make up North Carolina’s political ecosystem.
Until now.
Over the last several weeks, I have been building the Carolina Money Trail app, drawing on my own 15 years of experience as a campaign treasurer to map the network of financing that powers political campaigns across the state.
With Carolina Money Trail, you can see how money flows from one campaign to another, identify the major funders behind a particular campaign, and explore which PACs are playing the biggest role in a race—and who is funding those PACs. I have also used the employment information reported by individual donors to categorize contributions by industry, to the extent possible. That makes it easier to see how donors from different professions and industries line up behind different campaigns.
All of the data comes from publicly available campaign finance disclosures filed with the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
The app lets you explore the data from two primary perspectives: Recipient, where you can see who is funding a particular campaign or committee, and Donor, where you can see which campaigns a particular donor or organization has supported.
There is also a Network Web, an interactive network graph that shows how money flows into and out of campaigns and political committees across the state. Most of the visuals are interactive, so clicking on a donor, committee, or campaign will filter the underlying tables and allow you to dig deeper into the relationships behind the numbers.
My goal is to make North Carolina campaign finance data easier to understand, easier to explore, and ultimately more useful to anyone trying to understand who is financing politics in the state.
Let me know what you think. I have had quite a bit of fun building this, and I welcome any feedback on how to make it more useful, intuitive, and engaging.
Check it out here: finance.tarheeltally.com