How does OpenSecrets attribute contributions from donor‑funded nonprofits and super PACs to individual candidates — methodology and limitations?
Executive summary
OpenSecrets traces candidate support by combining Federal Election Commission filings with its own coding rules: it counts contributions from PACs and individuals giving $200 or more to candidates and parties, and it attributes money flowing to super PACs and outside groups back to donors (including corporate and union treasuries) when compiling industry and organization profiles [1] [2]. The project uses contributors’ reported occupation/employer and connections to ideological PACs to assign donations to industries, but that approach inherits gaps in disclosure, reporting lags, bulk reporting of some transfers, and limits in revealing whether outside spending is coordinated with candidates [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. How OpenSecrets constructs the basic contribution totals — data sources and thresholds
OpenSecrets’ dollar totals are built primarily from FEC and other public filings: contributions from PACs and individuals who give $200 or more to candidates and party committees are included, and money reported as going to super PACs and outside groups from donors (including corporate and union treasuries) is also counted in aggregate industry tallies [1] [2]. The organization’s campaign-expenditure methodology explicitly aggregates committee-to-candidate transfers and notes routine timing mismatches when donors and recipients report in different filing periods, which can make single-line totals differ across pages [5].
2. How contributor identity and industry attribution work
For individuals, OpenSecrets relies on the contributor’s reported occupation and employer to place that person in an industry category; the same category system is used across PACs, corporations, labor and individuals so that dollars can be tallied by sector [4]. Organization profiles separately track three buckets: the organization’s employees and members, the organization’s PAC, and the organization itself when it gives to outside groups — a design intended to show institutional influence even though corporations can’t give directly from treasuries to candidates [7] [3].
3. Treating super PACs and donor‑funded nonprofits in the totals
OpenSecrets includes contributions to super PACs and other outside spending groups in its sector and industry totals by attributing those receipts to the reported donors — i.e., the individuals, corporate treasuries or unions that fund the outside group — because super PACs’ receipts are reported to the FEC even if the committees then spend independently [1] [6]. OpenSecrets also separately follows outside spending by super PACs and single-candidate super PACs to map where independent money is flowing [8] [9].
4. Ideological and organizational coding: rules and assumptions
When donors appear connected to ideological PACs or causes, OpenSecrets applies additional logic to decide whether to treat a gift as “ideological” rather than industry-driven; its longstanding rationale is that donations by employees and executives often reflect the interests of the institutions they represent, and donors giving larger amounts are disproportionately senior executives — an empirical claim OpenSecrets uses to justify employer-based coding [3] [10]. The coding system aims for cross-class consistency so datasets for PACs, individuals and corporations can be compared [4].
5. Key limitations and blind spots
OpenSecrets cautions that many contributions are reported in bulk rather than itemized by candidate, that soft‑money disclosure has historical gaps (not required before 1991, outlawed as soft money after 2004), and that super PACs can raise unlimited sums that are often reported only at the committee level, complicating direct candidate attribution [3]. Practical limits include the $200 floor (smaller gifts are excluded from industry tallies), reporting lags and mismatches across filings [5], potential misclassification when occupation/employer data are stale or absent [4], and the fact that FEC reports do not reveal coordination between independent spenders and campaigns — an intrinsic evidentiary limit when attributing influence [6].
6. Competing readings and implicit agendas
OpenSecrets explicitly frames its methodology to surface industry influence by focusing on people associated with organizations, a choice that helps reveal corporate or sectoral leanings but also embeds an institutional perspective that benefits narratives about “follow the money” influence [3] [10]. Critics could argue that employer-based attribution overstates corporate intent when employees give for ideological or personal reasons, while defenders point to decades of correlation data OpenSecrets cites to defend the approach [10] [3].
7. Practical takeaways for users of OpenSecrets data
Users should treat OpenSecrets’ candidate and industry attributions as a rigorously sourced and carefully coded approximation built on FEC disclosure and occupational coding — valuable for aggregate patterns — but not as legal proof of coordination or a perfect map of who “bought” a particular candidate, because bulk reporting, dark‑money vehicles and reporting lags leave ambiguous the chain from donor to campaign [5] [6] [1].