(C) Tennessee Lookout
This story was originally published by Tennessee Lookout and is unaltered.
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Cash for Clout: Tennessee's million dollar club – Tennessee Lookout [1]
['Adam Friedman', 'More From Author', '- Monday July']
Date: 2023-07-24
The latest campaign finance reports were due July 17, 2023. A vast majority, but not every candidate and PAC has filed a report. Those will be updated as they are filed. The next filing deadline for lobbying reports is Aug. 14, which covers the first half of 2023.
The underlying data for this story comes from a lobbying report database and a campaign finance report database maintained by the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance. To create the top donor list, the Lookout combined spending from three categories — lobbying, campaign donations and independent expenditures.
Lobbying expenditures are provided in ranges. For example, when the report said $10,000 to $25,000, the Lookout used $17,500 for the amount spent. When the report said less than $10,000, $1,000 was used.
For campaign donations, the Lookout has tracked contributions to every candidate and political action committee connected to a candidate since 2009.
Contributions to candidates and their PACs were combined when reporting how much they raised. At times candidates and their PACs would give to other candidates. We removed all donations between elected officials to avoid counting various spending twice.
We also removed all self-donations involved in the 2018 gubernatorial race because Gov. Bill Lee and candidates Randy Boyd, Diana Black and Karl Dean donated a significant amount of personal money to each of their campaigns.
Independent expenditures were also reported as part of the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance campaign database under expenditures. We used a similar method for donations to compile a complete spending list.
Several companies, associations and families used multiple political action committees or changed their company name since 2009. The Lookout combined all the names it could find for a single company, family or association.
The data behind this story is also available to download:
This is the link to the completely unedited campaign finance database, which contains over 1.9 million rows of data (from Jan. 1, 2009 to June 30, 2023). (369 MB)
This is the link to an edited form of campaign finance data, which includes merged company names and tracks donations directly to lawmakers or those who ran for office from Jan. 1, 2009 to June 30, 2023. (24.8 MB)
The Lookout’s lobbying expenditures data (from Jan. 1, 2009 to Dec. 31, 2022) is available for download by clicking here. (3.3 MB)
Click here for the data on independent expenditures (from Jan. 1. 2009 to June 30, 2023). (0.3 MB)
Click here for the link to the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance campaign finance website.
Click here for the link to the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance lobbying website.
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