Tracking Financing in Congress.

Straight to the campaign: a person, a PAC, a party committee, or the candidate’s own wallet gives to a campaign account, up to a legal cap. ActBlue and WinRed sit here only as a pipe: the small dollars passing through stay the donors’ own. Disclosed in FEC filings.

Near the race, not to the campaign: super PACs raise unlimited sums and spend them for or against candidates, but may not give to or coordinate with the campaign. Politically active nonprofits do the same without naming their donors. The spending is disclosed on FEC Schedule E; the nonprofit donors are not disclosed at all.

On the officeholder: lobbying pays firms to influence how a member votes. It is filed with the House and the Senate, not the FEC, and never enters a campaign account. It is read on its own terms in Lobbying.

The channels use different disclosure systems and different legal limits, and some money is routed through more than one committee before it lands. A joint fundraising committee collects one large check and splits it among many campaigns, so summing the gross figure counts the same dollars more than once. A number that leads one list is first on that list’s axis, and nothing more.

Every list on the finance pages is one slice of the first two channels, drawn only from disclosed FEC data. None of them measures total money in politics.

Lobbying and dark money are not charted here: one is a separate disclosure system, the other is undisclosed by definition, so neither fits an FEC dollar axis honestly. Industries like oil and pharmaceuticals rank low on the direct-to-candidate lists for the same reason: they concentrate their money in lobbying and outside spending, which those lists do not measure.

$1.9 billion in dark money flowed through the 2024 election, a record, nearly double the 2020 total. It comes from groups that spend on elections without naming their donors. Roughly $1.3 billion of it reached super PACs by way of nonprofits that never have to say who gave it, so the money is public but the source is not.

None of this shows up in the numbers below. Those cover only the money each member had to disclose.

Source: Brennan Center for Justice, 2024 federal races.

Organized money is an organization's PAC checks plus the individual donations it bundles to a campaign. Money spent independently for or against a member is a separate story, below. Each member's money is counted over their most recent campaign: a two-year cycle for a House member, a full six-year term for a senator. An organization's cross-Congress total blends both windows.

Small donors are those giving $200 or less in total. Each bar pools every disclosed dollar its members raised in their most recent campaigns: all of Congress, then each caucus (independents are in Congress’s bar and in neither party’s). The two figures under the bars are the typical member’s shares, half of members above and half below. The pooled small-donor share (25%) is higher than the median member's because a few members raise most of the small-dollar money. Each member is read over their most recent campaign, so the $3.9B raised blends two-year House cycles with six-year Senate terms.

Each list orders members by the share of their most recent campaign's receipts that came from that source, or by the dollars. A senator's dollars cover a six-year term and a House member's a two-year cycle, so read dollars one chamber at a time. Small donors give $200 or less in total; the small-donor list counts members who raised at least $250,000. Organized money is an organization's PAC checks plus the donations it bundles. Own money is the candidate's own money put into the campaign, from FEC filings; that list counts members who raised at least $250,000 and put in at least $250,000 of their own.

Independent expenditures: money a group spends on its own to elect or defeat members, running ads for or against a race. It never passes through the campaign, so it is counted apart from the money organized for members. Whether a dollar supported or opposed a member is the group's own filing, never our reading.

A group can top this list and be absent from Biggest organized donors, because this money legally cannot go to a campaign. That is how the law sorts it, not an omission.

Helping Democrats is money spent electing Democrats or defeating Republicans; helping Republicans is the reverse. The four columns cover Democratic and Republican races only: a group that also spent on an independent's race carries that money in its total but in no column, so the four may not sum to the total.