BIG SPENDERS: Follow the fundraising trends up and down the ballot

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jan/Feb 2008 by Willis, Derek

The 2000 presidential election was the most expensive in history, No, wait, it was the 2004 election. Actually, it'll be the 2008 election-at least until 2012, Campaign finance reporting can be a fairly predictable genre, but it doesn't have to be, This is even more true for the vast majority of journalists who won't be covering the presidential contest itself.

Other than the consistent growth in the cost of campaigns, the other truism of campaign finance is that new techniques developed at the federal level eventually find their way to state and local elections, So the ideas that have dominated recent federal campaign finance coverage-bundling and lobbyist donations among them-also can and will affect down-ballot races in 2008, And money may not grow on trees, but for candidates, developing a network of financial supporters is enough like tending a garden that reporters should make sure not to neglect the "soil" that yields millions for candidates and parties.

From local office to Oval Office

Local and state elections sometimes get less data scrutiny than federal races do, but it shouldn't be that way. After all, local news organizations are closer to their local officials than anyone, and reporters are best positioned to connect the dots between contributors and recipients. Local lawmakers, in particular, sometimes operate as if their campaign finance reports receive only the most cursory examination; witness recent stories in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Louisville Courier-Journal that seem to indicate candidates' carelessness or lack of compliance in completing campaign reports.

The best reason to gather data on local candidates is for the stories. The second-best reason is that local candidates become statewide and sometimes national candidates. In this way smaller, local news organizations can produce stories beyond the immediate reach of larger media outlets because the local journalists have built up their database of campaign finance activity over time. And when these local candidates run, even for president, you'll be ready.

The nature of the current White House race, with no incumbent president or vice president running, makes it possible to look at campaign finance data in some new ways. For example, the "top-tier" candidates in both parties are running quite different campaigns than the other hopefuls in the race. Few things make the differences clearer than how and where these front-runners raise and spend money. The geographic spread of presidential campaign fundraising and spending is a telling collection of data.

Reporters have access to other types of data that can help flesh out the story, too. These include presidential campaign stops, which both the Washington Post and New York Times, among others, have been tracking and publishing. In-state groups in New Hampshire and Iowa do the same.

Campaign finance reporting doesn't have to exist on an island-it can play a part in a broader story alongside other types of data. On bundling, The Wall Street Journal has done extensive reporting on the people who serve as network fundraisers for campaigns, building on the innovations of the BushCheney campaign in 2000. Reporters can investigate whether these fundraising ideas have surfaced in the campaigns of congressional candidates and people running statewide campaigns. In all cases, we recommend compiling a donor history that covers federal and non-federal elections. This can prove valuable when you're trying to figure out who should be supporting a candidate but isn't.

House and Senate races provide another interesting historical twist: After 12 years of Republican majorities in the House and a tightly contested Senate, next year's election offers Democrats the chance to expand upon their slim majorities, while the GOP looks to regain its former perch. Races that involve freshmen lawmakers or those in competitive presidential states will provide excellent opportunities to use campaign finance data (except in most Senate races, where electronic filing is still not required). In the case of new House members, the data already filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) can be used to show how their situations (and backers) have changed-or whether they are vulnerable to a well-financed candidate. In addition, expenditure data can be used to measure how their campaign tactics have changed now that they are no longer challengers but incumbents. In this, voting records and other data can help tell the story.

New sources

If you haven't been focusing on politics 24/7, be thankful, but you may have missed some new organizations working with data in ways that can benefit reporters (see sidebar for details). One is the Sunlight Foundation, which in addition to conducting its own research on disclosure and corruption also has a Labs page that features several Web tools. Among them is LOUIS, a searchable index of executive and legislative branch documents, and a congressional API that can provide basic biographical information and geographic data for members of Congress. Another is the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which has expanded its offerings to include visualization tools.