May 13, 2010 08:53 PM UTC

Searchable database lets you track how Colorado Senate, House candidates are spending money

• 2 Comments
• by: BobMoore

We’ve added a new feature to the Coloradoan’s NoCoDatamine page, a searchable database that allows readers to examine how U.S. House and Senate candidates in Colorado are spending their campaign contributions. The Coloradoan’s database can be searched here:

http://www.coloradoan.com/arti…

You can search by candidate committee, race and range of donations. To search a particular House race, select “House” and then the appropriate district number. (The northern Colorado congressional district, for example, is 4.)

To look at how Senate candidates are spending money, select “Senate” and then “0” for the district.  

The Federal Election Commission this week made it easier to track expenditures of House and Senate candidates, by introducing a new candidate disbursement section on its Website.

“The FEC’s candidate disbursements tool is part of an ongoing effort to make the FEC website more comprehensive, user-friendly and intuitive, and is another step the agency is taking to make the electoral process more transparent to the American people,” said Commission Chairman Matthew S. Petersen.

The FEC site lets you look at individual disbursements, and you can go here to download data of all Colorado candidate expenditures in the 2009-10 cycle:

http://www.fec.gov/data/Candid…

But I think it’s more telling to look at aggregate expenditures, so voters can more quickly see how candidates are spending their money. So I have aggregated the contributions for our database, and that’s what you’ll find when you search the Coloradoan site.  

The expenditures are through March 31. As you’ll see when you search the database, the largest expenditures right now are for organizing, payroll and fundraising. For example, Michael Bennet’s Senate campaign has spent $392,690 on payroll and $281,140 on its top fundraising consultant.

As the campaign unfolds, you’ll see larger dollar amounts being spent on television advertising. As of now, only two Senate candidates – Democrat Bennet and Republican Jane Norton – have spent much on advertising.

This new data is particularly useful for Senate races. House candidates file electronically, and their data has been relatively accessible for years. But Senate candidates still file by paper, which makes it more difficult to analyze. The FEC has done a nice job hear of converting paper expenditure records for Senate candidates into a digital format, enhancing the transparency of campaigns.