Election Spending Dashboard helps track political spending

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has launched an election spending data dashboard that makes it easy to see how much the two major political parties spend on campaign and committee expenditures.

The Election Spending Dashboard provides public access to the federal records that track that political spending.

The Johns Hopkins research team was led by political science professor Adam Sheingate , who developed the dashboard with a team of undergraduate research assistants. The Election Spending Dashboard uses machine learning to aggregate the information from six million expenditure records reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2020 and October 2024. The dashboard will be updated as political committees file their year-end reports, helping users understand strategies the political parties used to try to win their races.

The dashboard is in the form of an x and y axis graph and divides the information into three main views by which the viewer can track spending: by election cycle; by committees; and by expenditures. Within the expenditures category there are nine types: administrative, consulting, digital, field, fundraising, media, polling, travel, and others.

The Hopkins team was attempting to also fix another issue they saw with FEC data, which was a lack of consistency or uniformity in language and terms used by different campaigns and committees for their spending categories.

"Using a machine learning process to classify descriptions of individual expenditures, the dashboard's nine categories offer a more comprehensive picture of campaign spending," wrote Doug Donovan for The Hub .

"With spending on federal elections continuing to set new records, we believe it is necessary to build a publicly available tool that can provide more transparency to voters on how funds are being spent," Sheingate said. "By following the money, we gain key insights into the structure and strategies of modern political campaigns."

Viewers see how much the Kamala Harris campaign is spending compared to the Donald Trump campaign on fundraising, digital ads, field offices, conducting polls; whether they are spending through Super PACs; and other information. At the moment, searching by expenditure types shows that both campaigns are spending most of their funds on media and digital outreach.

Candidates and committees must update their filings as the campaigns come to a close and as the year ends, so many of these numbers on the dashboard will change.

According to The Hub , members of the public and the media will have full access to the Election Spending Dashboard's dataset and an in-depth explanation of its methodologies through the project's GitHub page .