U.S. Elections Campaign Finance Story

I had come across a website prior to working on this project called OpenSecrets.org, which inspired me to look into campaign funding in U.S. elections. The website is home to a research group that tracks money in politics, including campaign finance contributions. The work that OpenSecrets does inspired me to look into the data myself, to see if any correlation lay beneath the committees and funding groups that propel election candidates into a position to win. I conducted research on several Political Action Committees, as well as notable election candidates in the 2022 Midterm Elections.

This project proved challenging largely due to the difficulty of requesting data from the Office of Campaign Finance, as well as finding exactly what kind of data I needed from the downloadable datasets on OpenSecrets' website. In order to create a dataset I was comfortable using for analysis, I first had to perform transformations on the data — removing duplicates, combining nearly-matched rows, and merging additional sources into a master candidate dataset. After conducting statistical analysis in Python and R, I gathered my visualizations and provided research context to present my findings.

To present the results, I built a scroll-through interactive visualization using Svelte.js and TailwindCSS. The final version can be viewed here.