Introduction

The way that money flows through the complex and often opaque network of presidential campaign committees is important public information. However, it can be frustratingly difficult for the average voter to gain visibility into the nature and relative scope of fundraising and spending throughout the system. The following graphics use data from mandatory FEC disclosures to provide some insight into what's happening with election funding this year.

Editorial Note: I have tried to show data that I couldn't find visualized elsewhere. If you've seen something elsewhere that's relevant, please let me know so that I can provide a link.

Candidate Revenues and Expenses

This interactive diagram shows revenue flowing to the official candidate committees for the six remaining primary candidates, as well as where that money is being spent.

Donald Trump is the only candidate to fund his campaign with loans (as pointed out by John Oliver). This means that he may be able to recoup those funds later in the election cycle. PACs do very little to directly fund candidates' campaigns, instead spending directly on advertising or outreach on behalf of the candidate(s) they support (see Independent Spending below). Operating expenses include salaries and transportation costs for campaign staff, promotional materials, and advertising.

Independent Expenditures

In addition to the activity of official candidate committees, outside PACs and individuals may independently advocate for or against specific candidates. The following graphic shows a summary of independent expenditures* broken out by candidate. The colored bars show independent spending in opposition (left), and in support (right). The thin bars are included to show how much candidates are spending directly on their own campaigns.

Bernie Sanders is the candidate with the smallest combined independent spending, shown by the total of both light and dark bars. Trump, Rubio, and Jeb! also make for an interesting comparison, with Trump receiving by far the most spending in opposition to his candidacy (over $30M), and Rubio / Jeb! receiving the most outside spending in support of their candidacies (over $40M and $80M respectively). Based on their success in the primaries, huge amounts of spending don't seem to make as much of an impact as donors might think.

*For a complete explanation of what consititutes "independent expenditures" please see the official FEC Independent Expenditures page.

Independent Expenditures by Category (excluding TV ads)

The following bar graph shows a breakdown of independent spending by category, combined for all candidates. The lighter bars represent spending in opposition to a candidate, and the darker bars show spending in support.

It's interesting to see that social media outreach fills a surprisingly small role relative to more 'traditional' electioneering communication like paper mailings, newspaper, and radio. Social media advertising is cheap however, so this isn't extremely surprising. Other online advertising receives significantly more spending, but is still tiny compared to television advertising, as shown in the following graph...

TV Ads vs. Everything Else

To put things in perspective, this chart shows independent expenditures on TV advertising in 2016 relative to everything else that was broken out by category in the previous chart.

All other expenses and non-television advertising total about $85M, well under half of what has been spent on television advertising this campaign season.

References

Built with D3 and the Sankey plugin using open data from the United States Federal Election Commission.

Comments or suggestions? Please reach out to me at [email protected]

© 2016 Austin Czarnecki