How to look up campaign finance yourself

Federal candidates: the FEC

Candidates for U.S. President, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House file their campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Start at fec.gov. You can search by candidate name and see:

• Receipts — money the campaign brought in, and where it came from.
• Disbursements — money the campaign spent, and on what.
• Cash on hand — how much money the campaign has left at the end of the reporting period.
• Debts — money the campaign owes.

Tennessee candidates: the Registry of Election Finance

Candidates for state and local office in Tennessee file with the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance. The report structure is similar: receipts, disbursements, cash on hand, debts, and lists of individual donors above a set threshold.

What is a PAC?

A political action committee (PAC) is a group that raises and spends money on elections. PACs report their receipts and disbursements the same way candidate committees do — you can look them up on the same portals.

What we do and don't do here

We teach the lookup.

We do not publish a candidate-by-candidate comparison table of who has raised how much. Fundraising totals are a snapshot in time, they do not measure whether a candidate would govern well, and side-by-side dollar comparisons implicitly rank candidates in a way we do not do anywhere else on this site.