I am Back: An Ambitious Project

I disappeared for a while - no new articles, I have a lot to say and a lot to write about but with my full time job and life I really want to focus on getting a project I have been working on for a long time finally out of the door....Daylight

What is Daylight?

Daylight is a visual interactive tool to see the where the money is flowing in American politics at both State and Federal level. Currently the State level is limited to 24 states but I am expanding it daily.

Why Did I Start Daylight?

When Louis Brandeis wrote in 1913 that sunlight is the best of disinfectants, he handed the money-in-politics movement its founding metaphor. Make the money public, the theory went, and the public will police it.

So the disclosure happened. Every PAC dollar filed with the Federal Election Commission, every itemized contribution above two hundred dollars sitting in a free public database. The sunlight arrived exactly as promised. What never arrived was the seeing.

I did not build another scoreboard as the numbers already exist. OpenSecrets has totaled them for decades, the FEC portal will cough up filings if you ask it nicely, and you can walk away from either with an accurate spreadsheet of who gave what. If you spend the time figuring everything out or only looking at the first layer of the onion.

I built Daylight because a spreadsheet tells you the money is there and never once shows it move. I wanted the flow itself: who hands what to whom, and where it travels next on a screen you could watch. I wanted to build a trajectory vs a total, I wanted to show people the flow of that money and what influence that flow is buying.

The trajectory difference is why this took so long and why I stopped publishing for a few weeks, I've been so close to completing this for a long time, I just needed to do some heads down work on it.

The map is the easy part, the hard part was what is underneath: matching a committee filed under one name to the same committee filed under a slightly different one, reconciling federal data against multiple state systems that each had their own opinion about what a date looks like. And these were the "easy" things I had to solve.

That is the unglamorous gap between "the data is public" and "you can read it," and somebody has to sit in it for a long time before the money holds still enough to be drawn. So I did.

Green is received, red is given. Click a node and the graph follows it. Node color is the industry. I pulled federal data for all states, and then local state data for 20+ states and growing every day.

The feature I cared most about is alignment — not how much a candidate raised, but whether the money they are receiving aligns with their positions.

A name running on the Democratic ticket quietly pulling a chunk of its funding from right-wing PACs is a far more interesting fact than any total. On the map you can't miss it, because the colors flowing in don't match the candidate they flow toward, and the it is circling this data to people that I want to make easily accessible.

I've also tried to identify individuals and see what their money represents - not the $200 donation from your grandma, but the $25,000 donation from an exec from a law firm that represents oil corporations.

None of the money on the map is new. Every flow was filed, dated, and signed, often years ago. It was never hidden — it sat in the daylight Brandeis promised, which disinfects nothing if no one can see it.

Daylight doesn't reveal a secret it finally sheds a light on the influence.

Check out Daylight today - please provide feedback or bug reports to james@readuncut.com