Where does Political Base get its Data?

Political Base accesses and manipulates public FEC records to calculate and generate our charts, totals and other money data. The FEC provides raw data to the public in two formats, both are used by Political Base.

• An ascii based text file for all contributions above $200, accessible by FTP. This feed includes data from 1980 to the present quarter.

• Scraped filings listed on the FEC site itself. While this data is only provided on the website and we have to crawl it, the site often includes more accurate data as well as contributions under $200. Unfortunately this data is only available from 2000 on.

Two sources? That sounds confusing. Which do you use, when?

We use the FEC website itself when we can, since it contains more complete data. Right now we're using it as a source for the 2008 presidential campaigns only, but will begin to historically include this data from any federal race since 2000. In all other cases, including 2008 Senate and House campaigns, we use the FTP provided ascii files, which while incomplete, at least provide some indication to the health of any given campaign. In many cases, it's the only available feed that we can use.

How come you're missing such and such campaign

When we run through the feeds we sometimes don't match every candidate to their person pages on Political Base. One of our daily tasks is to manually match these "lost" campaigns to people pages on Political Base, or in many cases, creating new pages for candidates we had no record of. For the most part, all major campaigns of the last 20 years or so will have data, but we still have a lot of matching to do. It's an ongoing process that we hope to have completed very soon.

We currently are only displaying money information based on individual contributions. This means that funds received by political committees or loans taken out by a candidate aren't included yet. This is something we'll be working on in the coming weeks.