Tips for Following the Money from the National Institute on Money in Politics:
by Chris Adams, National Press Foundation
5 Takeaways:
Free resources can help journalists track the flow of money in national, state and local politics. The Center for Responsive Politics has long tracked money federal elections – primary and general elections for president, Senate and House – on its website, opensecrets.org. On the state level, the National Institute on Money in Politics and its followthemoney.org has built a 50-state database of political contributions, as well as more than 2 million relationships between state lobbyists and their customers. Pete Quist, the institute’s research director, showed journalists how to drill down to state, county and city data.
Money in politics means more than just learning who funds campaigns. Journalists need to track campaign contributions as well as independent expenditures and lobbying data. For campaign contributions, followthemoney.org lets journalists drill down into a state, a legislative race, a candidate and then an individual donor. It also shows which industries are giving the most money. The data come from each state – sometimes through an easy electronic download, but other times only through a scanned image of a handwritten paper reports. “There is one state where we get some campaign financial reports sent to us in the mail,” Quist said.
Donors give for a reason: to gain influence. “If you see … that somebody making large donations to a candidate and seems to be getting preferable policy choices, that’s absolutely a story that needs to be written,” Quist said. The followthemoney.org site includes a tool called “Power Map” that uses data to indicate the likelihood that an officeholder will support or oppose a bill based on their pool of campaign donors.
Campaigns and elections data can also be used to illustrate the competitiveness of a state’s politics. The institute’s data can be used to find the percentage of a state’s contributions that are big or small, individual or institutional. This indicates how engaged the overall electorate is, and how partisan. The data show which individuals spread their contributions over multiple candidates, how much is being spent to win each vote, and how competitive a state’s elections are compared with the nation as a whole.
Reporters should also understand campaign financial laws and how they’ve changed over time. The Campaign financial Institute, a division of the National Institute on Money in Politics, has guidebooks to help journalists understand election law at the federal and state levels. It also publishes analyses of trends in election spending, such as “How PACs Distributed Their Contributions to Congressional Candidates, 1978-2018.”
This program was funded by Arnold Ventures. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
Speaker: Pete Quist, Research director, Followthemoney.org
National Press Foundation website: https://nationalpress.org/
NPF resources on politics: https://nationalpress.org/topics/politics/
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