By JACK DOLAN
-- From the Poynter Election Handbook: A Guide to Campaign Coverage, 3rd Edition.

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Covering campaign finance is never easy. The loopholes in campaign finance law at the federal level and the sheer diversity of campaign finance policies at the state level can be discouraging. Add to these complexities the fact that many campaign finance records on the state and local levels are still available only as stacks of paper, and the prospect of getting them, understanding them, and sorting through them can seem overwhelming.

What’s to Gain?

When reporters bear down and begin to map the flow of money through the campaign treasuries of elected officials, they can make a tremendous contribution to the way citizens understand the process of government.

• In 1997, The Columbus Dispatch did a story on a loophole in the Ohio campaign finance law that exempts in-kind contributions from any limit. The story showed how the state Republican Committee established a "veritable factory for in-kind contributions’’ to provide television ads, radio spots, computer services, and direct-mail campaigns for state Republicans all on an in-kind basis and therefore free from any limits.
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examined records from eight state agencies, state contracts, campaign contributions and expenditures, and the governor’s phone records to reveal a solid correlation between those who gave money to Gov. Tommy Thompson’s campaigns and those who got lucrative state contracts.
• The Palm Beach Post built a database of fees paid by public agencies to registered lobbyists. It turns out the taxpayers in Florida pay more to lobby their legislators on behalf of government agencies than they pay the legislators themselves.

What to Look For

Once you decide to start looking at campaign finance, it is important to learn as much as possible about the candidates, the party committees, the PACs, and the lobbyists before you start trying to figure out which contributions and expenditures are most newsworthy.

For example, it’s worth noting that a candidate received money from a casino owner. It’s a much bigger and better story if the candidate’s spouse owns a significant amount of stock in the casino (check the candidate’s personal financial disclosure), or the candidate is an incumbent sitting on the committee that regulates the casino industry (check committee assignments), or the casino owner contributed two days before a crucial vote on a bill that affecting the gaming industry (check voting records).

Look for relationships between donors, to find patterns of giving. Are these donors employees of the same company, members of the same union, registered to vote in the state, on the county or city payroll? But be careful about lumping donations together by industry – different sectors may have totally different agendas.

It’s also important to provide perspective and context for your audience. When reporting how much a single donor has given, compare that to total funds raised, or to other single donors’ contributions.

Where to Start

By far the easiest campaign finances to follow are presidential and congressional races because all candidates have to meet the same Federal Election Commission disclosure requirements. The FEC website is a reporter’s gold mine, offering summaries of receipts and disbursements, images of paper records, and downloadable databases of itemized contributions to congressional candidates from the 1992, 1994, 1996, and 1998 election cycles.

If you are not familiar with database software, a website set up by former FEC employee Tony Raymond has dozens of relatively simple ways to search the FEC databases online, some as easy as typing in the name of a candidate and getting an itemized list of every contribution he or she reported. 

Another good non-government source of campaign finance information is the Center for Responsive Politics at http://www.opensecrets.org/. There are excellent summaries of each congressional candidate’s finances that allow you to compare incumbents and challengers on totals raised and spent, see how much each candidate raises inside and outside his state, and find the metro areas and zip codes that give the most to each candidate.

Each CRP profile also contains a breakdown of contributions by business, labor, and ideological groups using codes developed by the center’s Larry Makinson. An example from the CRP site: The biggest single block of contributors to Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), a ranking member of the House National Security Committee, is aerospace defense contractors. The site lists top contributors, and they turn out to be Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, in that order.

An incumbent representative’s committee assignments and voting record can help you determine which campaign transactions are worth asking about. Both can be checked online at Congressional Quarterly’s Campaigns & Elections site or at Project Vote Smart.

State-level Campaign Finances

The process of learning about campaign finance is the same at the state level as at the federal level, but the sources are different. Thesecretary of state is where most candidates for statewide office and the state legislature file campaign finance reports. Many states are experimenting with electronic filing, and those states sometimes have databases of campaign contributions reporters can access easily through the secretary of state’s website. (For a map showing states with available campaign finance databases, check out http://www.campaignfinance.org or http://www.followthemoney.org).

But even if your state doesn’t have electronic filing, chances are someone in the secretary of state’s office has entered the paper records into a database. If they insist there is no database, ask how they enforce contribution limits. Without a database they would have to go through thousands of records by hand, a phenomenal waste of taxpayers’ money and a story by itself.

In some computer-phobic states, like Minnesota and New York, various non-profit and media organizations have gone to the trouble of acquiring the paper filings from the secretary of state and entering them by hand into a database. It may be worth asking someone at the secretary of state’s office if they know of anyone who has built a database from the campaign finance records.

A good online repository for state-level sources is the Campaign Finance Information Center at Investigative Reporters and Editors (http://www.campaignfinance.org). The site has downloadable data from many states, links to state-run online campaign finance search engines, a search engine that allows you to track contributors across state lines, and a library of federal, state, and local stories done using campaign finance records.

There also are links to other good online state data at sources like the Western States Center, the Center for Responsive Politics, and the Center for Public Integrity.

-- Dolan is the former Campaign Finance Information Center coordinator of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Money and politics stories not only are difficult to report but they also are challenging to tell. How can you make them interesting for your audience? Here are some suggestions:

Avoid cramming stories with numbers. Select a few examples that explain your story and put other numbers in a graphic or chart.

Focus on people and the connections between them, not just the money involved.

Look for the "why," not just the
"what" of campaign finance. Why do donors give to particular candidates? What are they hoping to achieve?

Look at spending, not just fundraising. Why do campaigns patronize certain businesses as opposed to others? Where does the money go?

Use television stations' sales and commercial traffic records to track political advertising. Stations must keep public files on all requests for broadcast time by or on behalf of candidates, including ad costs. How much are they spending? Who is paying the freight? Why does that matter?

Always answer this question: Why should the reader, listener, or viewer care about stories on money and politics?

Investigative Reporters and Editors has worked out a deal that allows members to get finance campaign information at a greatly reduced fee.

Instead of the usual $2,500-a-year subscription rate, members can get information for $150 a year from FECInfo Pro. FECInfo provides access to enhanced soft money databases, lobbyist registration and donations, and PAC contributions.

For more information, visit FECInfo at www.fecinfo.com.

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