The November 2026 midterm elections are fast approaching. With control of the House and Senate, 39 gubernatorial races, plus state and local level elections at stake, many creators find their audiences turning to them for information on ballot measures, candidates and voting.
One of the most important things creators can do is pull back the curtain on who is funding candidates and measures, showcasing the individuals and interests that may be influencing the policies and decisions they may make if elected to office.
That’s why News Creator Corps teamed up with OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit tracking money in American politics, to help support creators interested in tracking campaign finance, lobbying, political action committees (PACs), dark money and industry donations.
In a recent webinar, Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, laid out the basics of campaign finance, provided insights into how to use the Federal Election Commission and OpenSecrets websites to find information – as well as suggestions for stories creators can look into that are often overlooked.
Individual donations are a big story
“People focus on the super PACs and PACs, but if you’re not self-funding, individual contributors are super important,” said Glavin. “In a presidential race, 99 percent of the money going directly to a campaign is coming from individuals.”
Beyond making what’s available via the FEC more user-friendly, OpenSecrets also takes all the contributions that come in and, at the transaction level, assign a code for what sector and industry it belongs to.
“That’s the kind of thing you’re not going to get by looking at the raw data on the FEC site,” Glavin said.
Understanding the jargon
Here are some basics of the campaign finance landscape creators need to get started:
- The key actors include campaigns, parties, PACs, super PACs, individual contributors and dark money groups.
- We often hear about PACs and super PACs.
- PACs contribute directly to candidates and are subject to limits.
- Super PACs have no contribution limits, cannot coordinate with candidates and must disclose donors
- Dark money typically comes from 501c4s (organizations that are allowed to be involved with political campaigns and lobbying) or limited liability corporations (LLCs) with no disclosure requirements. They often fund super PACs.
- Federal contribution limits are $3,500 per individual per election to candidates and up to more than $400,000 per year to party committees, like the Republican National Committee or Democratic National Committee (RNC/DNC) when special accounts are included.
- State contribution limits vary widely. Some states, like Virginia, have no limits at all.
- A $200 aggregate donation triggers reporting that requires the name, address, employer and occupation of the individual at the federal level. States have a lower threshold for disclosure, often at $100 or less at $50 or $25. A few states require reporting everything.
“Dark money is money that’s being put into an election to influence the election or influence policy, where we do not know the source of it,” Glavin said.
He noted that super PACs are not innately dark money, but can quietly transform into it.
“A super PAC by itself isn’t a dark money group because it has to disclose,” Glavin said. “But if a super PAC’s primary source of funds is a dark money group, you end up with a super PAC that’s essentially become its own dark money group.”
Glavin also explained why corporations route money through super PACs.
“A corporation can spend directly on an election, but you don’t see that too much,” he said. “They’d usually prefer to make a contribution and have a super PAC spend the money for them — it gives a little separation from the spending.”
Using OpenSecrets as a reporting tool
Here are some key features of OpenSecrets that will be helpful to creators covering elections.
Right now opensecrets.org has federal data and followthemoney.org has state and historical data, but they will be merging into opensecrets.org in roughly a month. The website is mid-redesign so if a page is missing updated data for 2026, reach out to OpenSecrets to see if they have the data available internally.
- Candidate profiles for politicians, like members of Congress that contain:
- Fundraising history by cycle, PAC breakdown by type, sector, industry, and individual donor data
- Industry/sector coding: OpenSecrets assigns sector and industry codes at the transaction level using disclosed employer data
- Geography: in-state vs. out-of-state donation breakdown, as well as the ability to drill down by metro area and ZIP code
- Gender breakdown of donors, trended over time
- American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) bundling: earmarked contributions from members are aggregated and attributed to AIPAC
- Race pages that contain election specific information, like for particular Congressional elections:
- State map navigation; side-by-side candidate comparisons on money raised, spent, cash on hand
- Industry and PAC comparisons across all candidates in a race
- Note that incumbents typically dominate PAC money and challengers rarely collect as much.
- Organization profiles, like Chevron, that shows giving to Democrats and Republicans and candidate-level breakdown
- Campaign contribution data currently through 2024 on site, but 2026 data is available internally on request
- Lobbying data updated through June 30, 2026
OpenSecrets wants to help you
To contact OpenSecrets for custom data, source quotes, or FEC navigation help, email press@opensecrets.org. You can get custom data pulls, on- and off-record sourcing, expert quotes and help parsing CSV data exports.
You can also sign up for FEC notifications for specific committees to get alerts when they file reports, which can be useful on filing deadline days if you’re trying to get out new information quickly, since some reports don’t come in until 11 p.m. at night. The next filing deadline will be Oct. 15 and will cover donations and spending from July 1 through Sept. 30.
Some examples of content you can produce with this information include:
- Money-in-politics explainers, like:
- Who’s funding your representative, where you can use OpenSecrets to pull a candidate’s donors and break down who is giving them money by industry and individuals
- Following the funding of one issue, like AI regulations or healthcare, and show which industries are donating to which committees using OpenSecrets industry and sector data
- Simply explaining dark money to your audience using examples from this election cycle.
- If you’re following specific races, you can compare fundraising totals and big-donor versus small donation splits between candidates in competitive races or show how much super PAC money is flowing into a specific House district.
- You can compare incumbents’ voting records to who has funded them for a more accountability-focused angle.
- And don’t forget that OpenSecrets has state level data you can use if your platform is more focused on educating about a competitive gubernatorial race, for example.
- Local and municipal race data is more limited, so check with your state’s Secretary of State, county’s registrar of voters or other agencies or local ethics or elections commissions that may exist to better understand how they track campaign financing and lobbying and what sort of records and data they keep.