How to Cover a Candidate's Campaign Finance Report
Reporter Dave Levinthal explains where to look on the much-scrutinized forms filed by political candidates.
Investigative reporter Dave Levinthal has looked at a few campaign finance reports in his day.
For many reporters, the quarterly reports are another part of the horse race as they track who’s raising more money or getting more in-state support or small-dollar donors.
But as Levinthal explains, there are bigger stories hidden in them too.
What is a quarterly campaign finance report?
Federal political candidates (House, Senate, president) and many political action committees are required by law to file an accounting of their fundraising, spending, cash on hand and debts. Quarterly filing deadlines generally occur on Jan. 31, April 15, July 15 and Oct. 15 of each year. These entities may file as late as 11:59 p.m. on a deadline day, although most don't wait until the very last second.
Of course — thank you, federal government — our nation's campaign finance filing regime is a bit more complicated than just filing quarterly reports. For example, political party committee and some political action committees file on a monthly schedule. During non-election years, some committees file on semi-annual basis, not quarterly. There are also special filing rules during election years that compel political candidates to file additional reports immediately before and after their primary and general elections. But fret not! The Federal Election Commission publishes this guide and calendar to help you keep track of it all. You can also sign up for email alerts.
What should you do to prepare for getting a quarterly campaign finance report?
Foremost, know your filing dates. Creating calendar reminders for yourself ahead of time can save you the trouble (and embarrassment) of missing one you care about.
Also determine what you care about. Consider the case of the 1st Congressional District special U.S. House election in Florida, which will determine who fills the seat Rep. Matt Gaetz vacated. This special election has a special campaign finance filing deadline — on Jan. 16, 2025. Political reporters in Florida will want to pay close attention, but a political reporter in, say, Texas, probably won't care much.
Finally, figure out what's most important to your news organization and your readership/viewership/listenership. Do you want to provide them a basic but speedy round-up of the financial horse race — who raised how much cash, how much money do the candidates have left? Are you determined to do a deeper dive and search for oddities and anomalies using data journalism techniques? Answering these questions beforehand might help you decide whether to stay up late and race out a news break or rest up for a bigger, meatier analysis or investigation.
How, specifically, do you get one? Is there any way to get one in advance?
Federal-level political committees of any stripe file their campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission, a bipartisan government agency responsible for managing and publishing these reports. (And enforcing federal campaign finance laws.)
If a federal political committee files a campaign finance report electronically, as almost all do, it should appear on FEC.gov almost instantaneously. Pay particular attention to the "filings and reports" and "committees" sections of the FEC's website.
Is it possible to get a campaign finance report before it hits the FEC's website? Yes, although it's not common and will invariably require shoe-leather reporting — and some good sources within a political committee that you should develop early and often. Some campaign managers might be willing to give you an embargoed copy for your review, particularly if the numbers they'll be reporting are flattering to a candidate.
Note that if you're interested in a state-level campaign, such as governor or state attorney general, the FEC will not have the information you seek. You'll need to familiarize yourself with the state government website on which your state's campaign finance filings are published, and it'll be a different system from Oregon to Nebraska to Georgia and so forth. Same goes for municipal elections, such as mayoral races.
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Once you look at the report, what are you looking for?
Again, your own interests as a reporter may determine the answer to this question. But as someone who takes a more investigative approach to campaign finance, here are some things I'm looking for beyond the money raised/money spent basics:
Perspective and context. If a candidate has run for office before, what do their old campaign finance reports say about how they handle money? Do old campaign finance filings help explain the present or even foreshadow future events? These were questions I asked myself ahead of writing a piece in July 2024 headlined, "Rewind: Kamala Harris' 2020 presidential campaign was a financial disaster". It was a decidedly idiosyncratic piece published at a time when Harris' new campaign had just raised unprecedented amounts of money. Unsurprisingly, the Harris campaign hated the article and, at the time, told me as much. But after Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, Democrats themselves beganquestioning whether the Harris campaign squandered its massive financial resources on celebrities, glitzy rallies and gaudy advertisements instead of investing in less sexy but potentially more effective ground-level campaign tactics.
Sticky fingers. For several years, I've used campaign finance reports to chronicle millions of dollars in otherwise unreported thefts from campaign committees, such as a$690,000 theft from Sen. Jerry Moran's campaign and a $35,000 cyber-heist from the anti-Trump Lincoln Project super PAC. This requires paying ultra-close attention to details often buried in individual campaign finance report line items, since campaigns don't generally like advertising this stuff.
Scams. They come in all forms and fashions. One extreme example: A 2019 project I edited at the Center for Public Integrity about a telemarketing network and its foray into politics. After 18 months of work, we outed an obscenely wealthy man named Richard Zeitlin who had made his mega-millions by fleecing tens of thousands of Americans. The Department of Justice took notice. And in December 2024, a federal judge sentenced Zeitlin to 10 years in prison and an $8.9 million fine for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The seven-year odyssey all began with quarterly campaign finance reports that didn't pass the smell test.
Self-dealing. Maybe a political candidate is paying family members to do little actual work. Or a political action committee is funneling tons of cash to friends' firms for unspecified "consulting" services. Or maybe you're a Donald Trump-backing political committee that is spending boku bucks at properties owned by ... Donald Trump. During the first Trump administration, current Forbes reporter Zach Everson created a one-person news juggernaut — "1100 Pennsylvania" — off this very topic.
Deplorables. Is a campaign employing a lie-spewing provocateur? A criminal? Perhaps awhite nationalist and Holocaust denier? Quarterly campaign finance reports are supposed to list everyone a political committee is paying, so be sure to background these folks when possible.
"Dark money." This particularly applies to super PACs — those committees that may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for and against political candidates. Most Republicans don't consider "dark money" — donations that can't easily be traced to an original, human source — to be a problem. But most Democrats do, and they're quite vocal about it. This has prompted me to investigate whether leading Dems practice what they preach. Here's the answer, intwo parts.
What's not there. During the 2016 campaign, I spotted that Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign had disclosed "disputed debts" to city governments on his campaign reports. The rub: Cities were arguing that Sanders' campaign wasn't paying bills they had sent for providing significant police assistance to protect his campaign rallies. Sanders initially refused to pay, only to later relent right before announcing another run in 2020. But this led me to Donald Trump, who listed no such debts on his campaign reports — although I would laterreveal through records obtained from dozens of municipalities that Trump, too, was ignoring police bills at a much greater level.
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Who should you call to get a better understanding of the report?
First call the committee that's filing the report. They may or may not be helpful. If you can't find contact information for a committee press secretary or representative, each committee is required to list the name and contact information of a committee treasurer on its "statement of organization" filed with the FEC.
You may also want to contact the FEC's press office if you have technical questions — "Help, I'm clicking a link to a report but nothing is showing up!" — or want to get a comment from a commissioner. Just don't expect the press office to offer too much in the way of on-the-record comment, although you should always try anyway. (Email: press@fec.gov; 202-694-1219).
If you have some time on your side, get to know the folks at OpenSecrets, a nonprofit research and reporting organization, that literally exists to help journalists and the public make sense of political money. (Full disclosure: I worked at OpenSecrets from 2009 to 2011 as the organization's editorial and communications director.)
What are some ways in which a campaign finance report could be deceiving? Anything to watch out for?
Some campaigns love releasing information about a campaign finance report before they release the report in its entirely. BE SKEPTICAL. These sneak peeks are often a amalgam of cherry-picked facts, context- and comparison-free data points and enough rosy spin to make you fall down dizzy. If you must write a story off this nonsense, press the campaign to give you the full report and/or answer detailed questions about potentially unflattering stuff, such as financial liabilities, cash on hand, cash burn, etc. If the campaign refuses, say so in your story — and detail what their pre-release does not include.
Also scour spending reports for — to use a highly technical term — weird crap. For example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene disclosed on a campaign report in January 2024 that her campaign paid a $12,000 FEC fine. One problem: The FEC had fined Greene herself for an election law violation, not her campaign. A little bit of digging led to this story.