What a campaign raises and spends itself: contributions from individuals, PACs, and party committees, reported by the campaign on its own filings. This is money the candidate controls.
Money spent by independent groups — super PACs, nonprofits, individuals — to support or oppose a candidate. By law it cannot be coordinated with the campaign and never passes through the campaign's hands.
Direct money and outside spending are different things measured from different filings. Adding them produces a number that does not mean anything. You will never see them summed on this site.
If groups spend $5 million supporting a candidate and $4 million opposing them, some sites report "$1 million net." We show both numbers. Nine million dollars was spent trying to influence that race, and collapsing it to one number hides eight of them.
Campaign totals come from the FEC's candidate and committee endpoints. Outside spending comes from independent-expenditure filings — both the FEC's processed data and its raw bulk filing feed. We use both because processed data lags: newly e-filed expenditures and certain filer types (individuals and groups filing FEC Form 5) can take days to appear in processed totals. Every figure is scoped to the current two-year election cycle (2026), even for Senate candidates, whose campaigns legally span six years — Senate pages carry a note about this.
Small-dollar — unitemized individual contributions of $200 or less, as a share of total raised. PAC — contributions from other political committees, as a share of total raised. Non-committee filer — an independent spender that is not a registered committee (an individual or group filing Form 5); a descriptive fact, not a warning. Includes carryover — an incumbent's cash-on-hand includes money from before this cycle, flagged so old money is not mistaken for new enthusiasm.
Filings get amended; totals do not always reconcile; the same group sometimes spends on both sides of one candidate. Our rule: show filings as filed, flag anomalies, never silently fix them. When rows do not sum to a listed total, we say so. When a spender appears on both sides, we show both. When money cannot yet be attributed to a named spender, we show the gap honestly rather than hiding it.
No scores or grades. No transparency ratings. No speculation about motives. No summing what cannot be summed, no netting what should not be netted. No editorial framing about whether money is good, bad, or too much. Composition, not verdicts.