blastnabbit

Hey Solomon,

Appreciate you doing this! I'm just wondering: Is it giving voters meaningful information? Let me elaborate...

A search for Donald Trump, for example, show he's raised a total of $6,382,702.

But a quick browse of OpenSecrets shows that Our Principles PAC, a conservative super PAC, has raised almost $19 million for the purpose of "opposing Trump". It's not supporting a specific candidate, but is rather opposing one.

That's a very large sum of money that has entered the political arena, 18 times more than has been raised by super PACs supporting Trump, and 3 times more than the total raised funds in support of Trump that you've listed in your site.

(Incidentally, the Great America PAC has raised $1.2 million in support of Trump according to OpenSecrets, but it doesn't appear to be listed in the site either. Probably just old data, but you might want to get that updated if you're doing a big media push.)

Meanwhile, Sheldon Adelson has apparently said he was willing to contribute more than $100 million to help Trump get elected. A sum that large can not be in the form of a direct contribution, and will most likely go into one or a variety of super PACs.

If those PACs state they oppose Hillary Clinton, rather than that they support Donald Trump, how would a voter browsing your website recognize that one person had contributed such a vast sum of money essentially to getting Trump elected?

And if money raised for super PACs in opposition to candidates is not included in the visualization, is this a useful depiction of where each candidate gets their financial support, or simply half a finished product that could end up misleading voters more than informing them?

(Apologies if there's a way to visualize money raised in opposition to specific candidates, I didn't find it, but without identifying that cash you're missing half the money in politics -- in some cases, more.)

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Edit: Interestingly, $11.8 million has been spent by PACs supporting Trump, while $36.8 million has been spent by PACs opposing him. So roughly 75% of the PAC money spent in this campaign cycle surrounding Trump is not included in this visualization, despite being in the OpenSecrets dataset.

For anyone interested, a detailed breakdown of that spending can be viewed on OpenSecrets itself, as well as breakdowns of total candidate funding by industry, geography, demographic, and recipient.

The same reports are available for all the candidates. Here are Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

If you're considering making a donation today, please consider supporting the work of OpenSecrets by donating to the Center for Responsive Politics. They run the site and are a registered 501c3 with an excellent rating from CharityNavigator.

Interesting!

Ok, so I've turned on independent expenditures and I'd like to know how much money has been spent in opposition to Trump.

Cheating a little bit, I can see that the OpenSecrets database lists Our Principles PAC as spending roughly $887,000 in the last 2 weeks in opposition to Trump.

So where is this spending reflected in your tool?

I've gone through each of the categories on the pages of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich (turning independent expenditures back on again for each page), but none of them include expenditures from Our Principles PAC.

In cases like this, with a single-candidate opposition PAC, how do you determine which candidate to assign the expenditures to?

(Note: I don't support Trump, I'm just looking at his data.)