A Visualization of PAC Money in Congress

Welcome!

Welcome to our interactive visualization on PACs within the United States! PACs (Political Action Committees) are major players within the United States political system. They are large financing vehicles which pool money from individual and corporate donors, and represent a significant chunk of campaign dollars in this country. It is important to understand this to participate and remain informed within the political system. We sourced data from the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and Wikipedia. More information is enclosed in the README document.

Maps

How can we visualize campaign finance geographically?

These maps show PAC expenditures by district for the 2024 House of Representatives race, colored by winning party. Map A shows expenditures for all districts, while Map B removes outlier districts that were in contention for House leadership, giving a more representative visualization of spending distributions.

What causes are these PACs supporting?

What ideas are fueling money in American politics? Here is a wordcloud of unnested tokens from PAC names. The larger the word, the more frequently it appears.

Some ideas come up particularly often: Actblue and Winred are major partisan funding operations that funnel money towards a variety of Democratic and Republican candidates. Many of the other terms that appear frequently in the corpus of PAC names are political buzzwords, supporting our theory that PAC activity is tied to contentious districts and topics.

Does electoral competitiveness correlate with PAC Contributions?

Do competitive elections incentive candidates to seek and accept PAC donations? These graphs answer that question.

Here is a graph of PAC contributions against partisan lean by candidate. The dots on the right represent the most competitive races. The large grouping of dots at the bottom of the graph represent primary candidates.

Here is a plot of PAC contributions against partisan lean, summed by district. The dots on the right represent the most competitive races. A clear correlation is observed, as the most competitive districts get significant PAC donations.

These plots show us that both on the candidate and district level, there is a clear association between partisan lean and PAC donations.