Methodology

The data presented here is sourced from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) bulk disclosures and covers political contributions documented since 2016.

Unlike parliamentary systems where donations flow directly into central party headquarters, US federal campaign finance is decentralized across candidate campaigns, party organizations, and independent expenditure committees. To provide an accurate picture of the financial coalitions behind each movement, DonationWatch consolidates major funding vehicles into unified party totals ("Democrats", "Republicans", and "Bipartisan & Nonpartisan Super PACs"). This includes: • Official party committees: National, congressional campaign, and state party committees (e.g., DNC, RNC, DSCC, NRSC, DCCC, NRCC) • Authorized federal candidate campaign committees • Politically aligned Super PACs, Hybrid PACs, and Joint Fundraising Committees (e.g., Senate Majority PAC, Future Forward, MAGA Inc., Senate Leadership Fund, Harris Victory Fund, Trump 47 Committee) • Nonpartisan and industry-focused Super PACs that back candidates across both major parties (e.g., Fairshake, United Democracy Project)

Why some PACs are not mapped to a party: Official party and candidate committees report a declared party affiliation in FEC records and are mapped automatically. Super PACs and Hybrid PACs operate as independent entities without formal party declarations; DonationWatch continuously audits and maps all prominent committees reaching $5 million or more in cumulative receipts. Smaller single-issue groups, corporate PACs, and committees below this threshold without clear alignment remain unmapped to prevent speculative attribution, and their receipts are excluded from party totals.

Data normalization & scope: • Minimum Amount: Only contributions of $10,000 or greater are tracked. Because federal law caps direct donations to candidates ($3,300 per election) and traditional PAC accounts ($5,000 per year), this threshold isolates high-dollar receipts to party committees, Joint Fundraising Committees (JFCs), Super PACs, and unlimited Hybrid PAC accounts. • 501(c)(4) Non-Profits ("Dark Money"): Contributions from 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations (e.g., Future Forward USA Action, One Nation) to Super PACs are recorded as organizational receipts (ORG), as these entities do not disclose their underlying donors to the FEC. • Deduplication: JFC contributions are recorded at initial receipt, while internal distributions and attribution memos are discarded. Conduit pass-throughs (WinRed, ActBlue) and transfers between tracked committees are excluded so funds are counted only once. • Exclusions: Refunds are deducted from donor totals. Candidate self-funding (loans and personal contributions) and operating revenue (interest, dividends, asset sales) are excluded.

Visit official source register (Federal Election Commission (FEC))

The dataset covers published political contributions starting from 2016.

Records since 2026 are preliminary and subject to ongoing filings or retrospective updates by the source authority.

DonationWatch applies a minimum inclusion threshold of $10,000.00 per transaction for this dataset.

This threshold is configured by us to avoid an excessive volume of small donations, and may be higher than the minimum amount exported by the upstream registry. Contributions with an absolute value below this amount are filtered out.

Party-level inclusion: All political parties with valid reported contributions above the transaction threshold are included.

Refunds and net-zero filtering: Some registers record returned or refunded contributions as negative entries. Donors or recipient parties whose cumulative net contribution sum across the dataset is zero or negative are excluded.

Raw disclosures undergo deterministic, rule-based normalization during ingestion to standardize entity names, consolidate organizational branches, and exclude non-qualifying entries:

• Base string cleaning: All entity names undergo Unicode NFKC normalization, trimming of surrounding quotation marks and trailing commas, and collapsing of duplicate whitespace.
• Donor key clustering & country rules: A canonical lookup key (stripping all non-alphanumeric characters and case-folding to uppercase) groups casing, spacing, and punctuation variants under a single canonical donor name. Where configured for a country's loader, additional rules standardize local legal entity suffixes, strip personal titles, or map known aliases—with every merged variant listed in the Aggregated Donors section below.
• Receiver mapping & consolidation: Reported recipient names are mapped to canonical political party entities. Where registers report contributions to regional, local, or youth party units separately, they are consolidated into a single party total (listed in Aggregated Receivers below when applicable).

Important limitation on donor identity (homonyms vs. unmerged variants): Official party funding registers rarely publish unique personal identifiers (such as national identity numbers, tax IDs, or birth dates) for individual donors. Contribution totals on donor profile pages are aggregated strictly by normalized donor name. As a result, a single donor profile may combine contributions from multiple distinct individuals who share the exact same name (over-aggregation), while variations containing middle names or unmapped abbreviations may remain separate profiles (under-aggregation).

Our compiled, normalized dataset and visualizations are released under the CC BY 4.0 licence.

For researchers, journalists, and data scientists, the complete normalized dataset for United States can be downloaded via our Download bulk dataset (CSV / JSON), and the exact ingestion and normalization rules can be audited in our Inspect country loader source code (GitHub).

Dataset last processed: October 24, 2026.

Latest recorded transaction in dataset: September 30, 2026.

The processing timestamp indicates when our pipeline last synchronized and compiled data from the official register, whereas the latest transaction date reflects the most recent contribution date present in the published records.