Campaign Finance Data
The following are visualizations of the 2020 election cycle's campaign donations and expenditues from the Federal Election Commission's public data
Highlights:
- 42 million donation transactions
- 2.2 million operating expense records
- 7800 political candidates
In and out of class, I find large public datasets to experiment with. I downloaded all political donations and political operating expenditures from the FEC's website, in addition to committee and candidate records to link transactions to the correct party and candidate. The donation transactions had to be separated into 79 .txt files so they would be small enough for a local machine to open. Using python and SQL, I cleaned and uploaded the data to an AWS database, and created data visualizations in Tableau.
Unfortunately, Tableau public does not allow live AWS data connections, so I included photos of my visualizations below instead of the interactive workbooks.
Donation Data
Political Contributions Received by Democrats and Republicans by State
Expense Data
The biggest spenders and fundraisers of the 2020 election cycle:
A summary of political expenses by state, party, and expense allocation
