Handbook·Money in politics

How to trace money in a local race

Guide·Effort an afternoon·Leverage MODERATE·Verified 2026-07-10

The answer

Start with FollowTheMoney.org, a project of the National Institute on Money in Politics that merged into OpenSecrets in 2026,1 for state legislative and many state-level local races. Then check whether your own state, county, or city runs a separate disclosure portal, because coverage below the state legislative level is uneven. Some cities publish itemized, searchable donor data. New York City's Campaign Finance Board is the strongest example.2 Many counties and small cities have no online search at all, or no disclosure requirement below a low spending threshold.3 This works well for state legislative and statewide races. For city council or school board, expect thin coverage that depends heavily on where you live.

Before you go

  • Know the office type. State legislature and statewide races are far better covered than city council, school board, or county commissioner races.
  • Have the candidate's full name and the county or city where they're running. Local filings are rarely indexed by district alone.
  • Check whether your state runs its own portal, like California's Cal-Access or the Texas Ethics Commission's filer search, before assuming FollowTheMoney has current data. Its state data is current only through the 2024 cycle as of mid-2026.
  • For city races, search "[city name] campaign finance disclosure" or "[city name] city clerk campaign finance" first. Many cities run portals separate from the state.

The mechanics

  1. Go to FollowTheMoney.org and use "Search Our Data" to search by state, year, and candidate or committee name.
  2. For a state legislative race, FollowTheMoney lets you drill from a state down to a specific race, a candidate, and individual donors with their listed employer or occupation.
  3. If FollowTheMoney's data looks stale or absent, check your state's own portal. California uses Cal-Access (cal-access.sos.ca.gov), still the live system as of 2026 while its long-delayed replacement remains unfinished.4 Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) covers state and judicial filers but explicitly excludes local filers.5
  4. For a city or county race, look for a city-specific portal first. New York City's Campaign Finance Board runs its own "Follow the Money" search (nyccfb.info/FTMSearch) with itemized contributions and downloadable CSVs by election cycle.2
  5. If no online portal exists, contact the local filing authority directly, typically the county clerk, city clerk, or county elections office. Texas Ethics Commission's own guidance tells filers of local offices, county commissioner, JP, constable, mayor, city council, school board, MUD or water district, to file with a local authority, and directs the public to contact that authority since TEC's own search doesn't include those filings.5
  6. Cross-check any name search against the candidate's official campaign committee name. Donor and vendor records are usually filed under the committee, not the candidate's personal name.

What to look for

Itemized contributions above the disclosure threshold, federally $200 aggregated per cycle,6 state thresholds vary, show donor name, city, state, employer, occupation, date, and amount. Look for clusters: repeated donations from the same employer, real estate or development interests giving to a candidate on a planning-heavy council, or a late surge of out-of-district money before an election. A 2024 example from Washington's 22nd Legislative District showed corporate PAC money, including K&L Gates' Continue PAC, Kaiser Aluminum, Kroger, and Microsoft, flowing into a state legislative primary, documented by local outlet Works in Progress using FollowTheMoney data.

What happens next

Once you have a donor list, check whether the same donors or industries also fund the candidate's opponent, for comparison, or show up across multiple races in your area, for pattern-spotting. If you can't find an itemized donor list at all for a small local race, that's informative too. It may mean the race falls under your state's disclosure floor, or that filings exist only on paper at a county office.

Does it work

FollowTheMoney's own documentation confirms 50-state coverage of statewide, legislative, and state supreme court races going back years, with "selected local-level data" described as a recent expansion, not full coverage.1 The clearest documented local-disclosure gap comes from the Texas Ethics Commission's own filer guidance, which routes local candidates to local authorities outside TEC's searchable database,5 and from the Institute's own local-disclosure best-practices report, which names towns with no local requirement at all.3 Coverage varies enormously by state: bigger, better-resourced cities with active reform movements, like New York, are far more likely to run a well-built local portal than a small town or rural county.

Take action

Pull the donor list for a race you care about this week. Check /engage for state-specific portal links and a walkthrough for your jurisdiction.

Sources

  1. FollowTheMoney.org (National Institute on Money in Politics / OpenSecrets), "About Our Data," 2026. source ↩ ↩2

  2. New York City Campaign Finance Board, "Follow the Money" search and Data Library, 2026. source ↩ ↩2

  3. FollowTheMoney.org / National Institute on Money in Politics, "Best Practices for Disclosure of Local Candidates' Campaign Finance Data," 2026. source ↩ ↩2

  4. CalMatters, "California campaign finance website won't be fixed for years," 2026. source ↩

  5. Texas Ethics Commission, "Filing Reports for LOCAL Filers," 2026. source ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. FEC.gov, "Contributions by individuals file description" and 11 CFR Sec. 104.3, 2025. source ↩