campaign finance data

It is the money trail of electoral politics at transaction grain. The FEC's own distribution runs deep: 'bulk master files 1979-1980 to 2025-2026; PostgreSQL dumps 1975 to present' - nearly five decades of structured filings.

Non-profit re-publishers add value on top. OpenSecrets processes 'millions of FEC transaction records per cycle plus lobbying filings since 1998', standardizing donor and committee relationships the raw files leave to analysts. Adjacent regulatory records - election and procurement files alongside agency ad-spend reporting - surface in the Data.gov advertising slice, rounding out political-spending analysis.

Raw-versus-cleaned is the pivotal choice. FEC master files are canonical but require heavy normalisation; OpenSecrets trades some rawness for usable entity resolution and lobbying integration back to 1998.

Vintage discipline matters too: filings amend, so any product must state whether it carries original or amended versions. Because these are regulator publications in the commercial delivery terms, commercial vendors should differentiate on enrichment - employer matching, cycle rollups, geocoding - rather than access, which anyone can replicate from the same free files.

1. Check temporal depth. Bulk master files span 1979-1980 to 2025-2026 and PostgreSQL dumps reach 1975 - shorter archives need justification.

1. Verify transaction grain. Contributions, disbursements, independent expenditures and lobbying records should each be distinguishable.

1. Assess enrichment claims. Millions of FEC transactions per cycle are re-published by OpenSecrets with lobbying since 1998 - compare cleaning quality, not availability.

1. Mind amendment handling. Amended filings supersede originals; undated extracts corrupt trend work.

• public-domain-government-data - the licensing footing of FEC publications.

Sector context: advertising data - where election and ad-spend records sit alongside campaign finance.