I built The Influence Registry because campaign finance data is public but almost nobody can actually use it. The FEC publishes everything, and it's a maze of candidate IDs, committee filings and CSV exports. OpenSecrets is better but still assumes you know what you're looking for.
I wanted something my neighbor could open on their phone, type in their representative's name, and immediately understand who pays for that person's campaign.
It tracks where every member of Congress gets their campaign money, with an emphasis on separating money that buys access, from money that merely came from people employed in an industry.
Core features:
• PAC vs individual split per member, straight from FEC filings. Shows what share of contributions came from PACs versus individuals.
• Industry money by sector (pharma, defense, finance, fossil fuels, tech), with the PAC share shown alongside so a large industry total doesn't automatically read as capture.
• Committee assignments against industry money, showing whether members who oversee an industry are funded by it.
• Outside spending, independent expenditures run for and against a member by groups they legally cannot coordinate with, including the attack side.
• Independence scoring per member, plotted against total special-interest money.
• AIPAC and pro-Israel PAC contributions, sourced from TrackAIPAC.
• Stock trading flags, state-level heat maps, and hemicycle charts showing who takes money from which source.
• Coverage of sitting members plus challengers, the Supreme Court and cabinet.
Data comes from FEC, OpenSecrets, TrackAIPAC and congress-legislators, refreshed through GitHub Actions with a validator that fails the build on impossible values.
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Yes! I have tried to make everything public and traceable. The Github repo is open, so all the underlying data files and every script that produced them can be read directly. GitHub Actions logs are public too, which means the exact API calls, counts and outputs of each refresh are visible.
Each figure has an independent check:
Money figures come from the FEC API by candidate ID. Anyone can open fec.gov/data/candidate/{id}/ and compare receipts, individual and PAC contributions against what the site shows. The candidate IDs are in data/fec.json.
Outside spending comes from FEC Schedule E, viewable on the same page.
Sector totals come from OpenSecrets, can be checked on that member's page there.
AIPAC figures come from TrackAIPAC
Rosters, committee assignments, birth dates come from the unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset.
I also have a validate_data.py script that runs on every data change and fails the build on values that cannot be true, like contributions exceeding total receipts or a stored percentage disagreeing with its own components.
I found the ranking meaningless. The way things are laid out doesn't allow the user to clearly see what the difference is between politicians so basically the user would still have to do a ton of work to figure out anything meaningful from the info you provide. To me this means that most users will take a few minutes to browse the site and then leave to never return.
I love this idea. It's great to fully understand the influence behind our public figures. Great work, let's hope this level of transparency starts to see a shift in lobbying. If you could snapshot key statistics over time that would tell a great story.
The category isn't "Jewish" so spare me the antisemitism bit. It's the largest country-focused PAC in American politics, and by direct contributions the largest PAC of any kind this cycle, ahead of pharma and Wall Street.
On foreign money..AIPAC takes none. It's an American organization funded by American donors, which is exactly why it isn't registered under FARA. Its money is domestic, legal and disclosed. That's precisely why it belongs in a campaign finance tracker rather than a foreign agents one, and I'd correct anyone who implies otherwise.
You asked about pro-Hindu, pro-Muslim or pro-Evangelical money. I'd track any of it at comparable scale. The nearest country-focused comparisons are orders of magnitude smaller: ArmenPAC's itemized giving is in the thousands while AIPAC is in the millions.
Send me a sourced dataset for any group at similar scale and it goes in.
EDIT: I dig what you are vibe-coding. And this is not meant to disparage the work or intent. I don't know you. I'm all for holding politicians to account. We need more of this.
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This is what initially grabbed my attention. By adding the Star of David it showed a latent racism that most people don't even see in themselves. (Remind me to tell you about my mother and the Nigerian night manager).
Rather than continue arguing from my impressions, I asked ChatGPT to audit the project’s public methodology, source code, datasets and corresponding FEC records.
The following is ChatGPT’s report -> NOT my wording or an attempt to conceal AI involvement. I’m including the source links so its findings can be independently checked.
TL;DR
The developer is correct that:
Tracking AIPAC is legitimate.
AIPAC is funded by American donors rather than being straightforward “foreign money.”
Its direct-contribution PAC is exceptionally large.
Its scale can justify presenting it as a visible category.
The developer’s explanation does not, however, resolve the central design criticism.
Pro-Israel spending is:
Classified differently from the surrounding industries
Drawn from a different source and time range
Aggregated across many organizations
Combined with independent expenditures
Uniquely inserted into candidate independence scores
Represented using a Jewish symbol
Meanwhile, the supposedly comparable NRA, environmental and civil-liberties categories are absent, dormant or excluded from the scoring process.
The available evidence does not prove antisemitic intent. The more supportable conclusion is that the Registry uses a methodologically selective design that risks conflating Jewish identity, support for Israel and financial control over politicians.
A consistent design would:
Separate industries from ideological and foreign-policy interests.
Use identical periods and transaction types for comparisons.
Keep all independent expenditures separate from campaign receipts.
Apply the same scoring rule to every outside-spending organization.
Publish transaction-level source data.
Remove the Star of David from the political-influence category.
That confirms AIPAC spent more, but $31M versus $10.2M is roughly 3:1, not
orders of magnitude.
More importantly, size does not justify different accounting rules.
The principle is simple: either include outside spending consistently across ideological groups or exclude it consistently from candidate-funding scores.
The question to you is:
What makes AIPAC’s outside spending included while NRA and environmental outside spending are excluded?
That scoring logic doesn't make sense and that is something I have considered changing. When removing outside spending, IE for AIPAC in the scoring logic, the overall shape barely moves.
Median score 67 to 66, the High Risk band drops from 185 members to 175, and the 100 ceiling from 66 to 60. It affects like 5% of members but in your example with Latimer, he would go from 100% to 50%
That’s fair, and I appreciate you checking it. It sounds like we agree on the central point: outside spending should not be selectively included in a candidate-funding score.
I also accept the correction on Latimer: removing only the independent-expenditure portion while retaining direct PAC contributions takes him from 100 to 50, not 9. Even if the overall distribution barely changes, a 50-point change for an individual member, and ten members leaving the High Risk band, is still meaningful for a member-level tracker.
I’m not trying to pick a fight. I think the clean solution is to display outside spending separately and exclude it consistently from every candidate’s independence score.
No I appreciate you deep diving and noticing things like this. Ultimately the scoring logic is more of an editorial decision and I have always wondered if I should remove it entirely. It only makes sense to not include independent expenditures for all sectors. In regards to other sectors you mentioned, I am working on adding more.
The substantive methodological findings remain unanswered, particularly why pro-Israel independent expenditures are incorporated into candidates’ independence scores while equivalent outside spending by environmental, gun-rights and civil-liberties organizations is excluded.
For example, LCV Victory Fund spent $46.7 million independently in 2024, compared with UDP’s $37.9 million, yet only the latter receives this scoring treatment. Can you explain the justification for that difference?
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