PA Political Contributions Explorer

Position summary

How to use this. The Politicians and Donors tabs are full indexes — every row is here, searchable and sortable. Click any row and it opens in the Explorer, which works in both directions: pick a politician to see everyone who funded them, click any donor in that list to see every politician they funded, and keep walking the network.

Pennsylvania bars corporations from contributing directly to candidates (25 P.S. § 3253), so corporate money must move through a PAC and rarely looks corporate at state level. That is why donors carry an industry tag and, where a chain could be traced, an ultimate source.

Two findings. Jeffrey Yass gave $37.79M, all of it to PACs, routed through a layered network (Students First PAC → Commonwealth Children's Choice Fund → Commonwealth Leaders Fund). Traced pro-rata through that network and every PAC it feeds, $3.87M of his money reached candidate committees, each dollar counted once. And building trades union PACs out-give contractor PACs roughly 25 to 1 ($23.5M vs $0.93M) in direct contributions to PA candidates, excluding contractor owners giving as individuals. Restated 2026-09-29: the earlier “$71.25M traced to Yass” counted the same dollars at each layer, and the earlier “10 to 1” rested on a miscalibrated industry classifier. Do not quote either.

Every politician

Politician	Office	Party	Total received	Org / Indiv	Donors

One row per politician, not per committee — PA re-issues candidate filer IDs each election year and a politician often files under several vehicles at once. Click a row to see their donors.

Every donor

Donor	Type	State	Total given	Recipients	Industry

Name variants are collapsed — “Jeff Yass”, “Jeffrey Yass” and “Jeffery Yass” are one entity. Click a row to see every politician they funded.

Method, and what not to trust

Completeness

This page carries all 1,353 politicians, all 356,382 resolved donor entities and all 189,216 donor-to-politician links — no threshold, no top-N cut. The data is gzipped and decompressed in your browser, which is why nothing had to be dropped to make it load. Individual receipt-level rows (3.3M of them) live in the CSV layer; the natural grain for a two-way explorer is the donor-to-politician relationship.

Four things to know before quoting any number

1. All donor classification is derived. No jurisdiction publishes a reliable corporate-versus-individual flag. PA has no such field; Philadelphia's is 92% “Not Specified”; only the FEC's entity code is dependable.

2. Totals use primary rows only. 46% of Philadelphia dollars ($80.1M) duplicate a PA state row for committees filing in both places. Duplicates are flagged, not deleted.

3. Entities are resolved conservatively. A wrong merge invents an influence claim, so borderline matches go to a review queue (38,140 pairs). Each name variant is keyed by name plus ZIP or state and employer, so same-named people in different places are kept apart. The 2026-08-04 build collapsed them; this build does not.

4. PAC money is traced pro-rata. Each funder is credited its share of a PAC's receipts, carried through PAC-to-PAC transfers and counted once, where the money leaves the PAC network. The chain diagrams still follow a PAC's dominant funder (50% or more of receipts), so a PAC funded 45/45/10 shows no single chain.

Defects caught by auditing output

Four different Williamses merged into one donor. A Reading PA “John M. Arnold” folded into the Houston megadonor. Comma-stripping reversed every federal name, so FITZPATRICK, BRIAN parsed as first-name Fitzpatrick and federal records never matched their PA counterparts. Regexes ending in a word boundary meant CARPENTER never matched “CARPENTERS”. An industry rule matching BRIDGE tagged candidate committees named “Bridget” and “Bridges” as contractors. The FEC's connected-organization field is free text for some filers and attributed Commonwealth Leaders Fund to a sponsor named “DEATON” — a $16M misattribution. Counting each layer of a PAC chain in full tripled the Yass total. Dual-filed gifts were missed as duplicates when only one copy had been linked to a politician. A filer used the donor-name field to write “SEE LIST ATTACHED TO COVER LETTER”, which still appears as a $0.09M donor.