What do OpenSecrets and FollowTheMoney show about Dan Bongino’s campaign contributions?
Executive summary
OpenSecrets and FollowTheMoney (now integrated operations stemming from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in Politics) provide public records tracing Dan Bongino’s campaign finance activity, but the readily available snapshots in those databases are narrow: OpenSecrets’ vendor pages show payments to entities tied to Bongino (Bongino Inc received $18,214 in the 2020 cycle) while a FollowTheMoney vendor snapshot for “Bongino For Senate” reports $0 in vendor payments for 2024 — and both sites warn users about integration gaps and incomplete maintenance that limit firm conclusions [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What the two databases are and how they work
OpenSecrets compiles federal campaign finance data largely from FEC filings and supplements that with proprietary coding and research; FollowTheMoney is the state-focused National Institute on Money in Politics; the organizations have merged back-end operations and data flows, so users may encounter mixed or transitional records across the platforms [5] [3] [4].
2. What the public records explicitly show about Bongino’s campaign receipts and vendor payments
OpenSecrets’ vendor profile for “Bongino Inc” lists $18,214 in reported payments during the 2020 election cycle, a figure presented on the site under its campaign-expenditures/vendor reporting [1]. FollowTheMoney’s vendor-level page for “Bongino For Senate” returns a $0 total for reported vendor payments in the 2024 election cycle, an outcome explicitly displayed on that vendor profile [2].
3. What those line items actually represent — payments, not necessarily broad donor patterns
The entries cited are vendor or recipient profiles that record payments reported to or from campaign-related entities; a vendor payment to a Bongino-linked company is not the same as listing the full universe of individual contributors, PAC donors, or in-kind support that would appear on a candidate’s full contribution ledger (the sites themselves frame these as vendor/expenditure profiles and explain their data sources) [1] [2] [5].
4. Data limits, integration caveats and why that matters for interpreting Bongino’s fundraising
Both FollowTheMoney and OpenSecrets flag that their integration and site maintenance are in transition and that users may run into bugs or gaps; FollowTheMoney notes it displays 50-state contributions and has absorbed decades of records but warns that some data remain on legacy pages while OpenSecrets explains most federal records derive from FEC filings and its coding adds value to raw disclosures — together these notices mean a quick vendor snapshot may undercount or misrepresent total fundraising or outside spending associated with Bongino unless corroborated across candidate contribution pages and official filings [3] [4] [6] [5].
5. Contextual notes and alternative readings
Public biographical and campaign material show Bongino as an active political figure who ran for Senate in 2012 and has built media enterprises that interact with political money flows, which complicates vendor and recipient tracing [7]. Observers could reasonably draw two different inferences from the database snapshots: one, that Bongino’s campaigns and affiliated entities had modest, traceable vendor payments in certain cycles (as the $18,214 figure suggests) [1]; two, that a $0 vendor total in a later cycle may reflect no vendor payments reported to that specific vendor profile, incomplete filings, or the fact that financial activity moved through different entities or outside groups not captured in that single page [2] [3].
6. Bottom line for a reader trying to understand Bongino’s money
OpenSecrets and FollowTheMoney provide verifiable, narrow documents: OpenSecrets records show Bongino Inc received $18,214 in reported payments in 2020, and FollowTheMoney’s vendor page for Bongino For Senate shows $0 in reported vendor payments for 2024; both platforms caution users about integration, coverage differences between federal and state filings, and potential data gaps, so any definitive picture of Bongino’s total contributions, donor composition, or outside spending requires consulting the candidate contribution tab, FEC state filings, PAC reports, and corroborating records across both databases [1] [2] [3] [5] [4].