Pennsylvania Political Contributions Index

Position summary

Why the organizational / individual split is the primary axis

Pennsylvania bars corporations from contributing directly to candidates (25 P.S. § 3253). Corporate money must move through a separate segregated fund, so at state level it almost never looks corporate — it arrives as PAC money. That is why this sheet carries a sponsor-tracing layer: without it, corporate influence is structurally invisible.

Money received, by politician (all vehicles, all years)

One row per politician, not per committee. PA re-issues candidate filer IDs every election year and a politician often files under several vehicles at once; these are consolidated. Sort any column; the split bar shows organizational versus individual.

Largest donors, after entity resolution

Name variants are collapsed — “Jeff Yass”, “Jeffrey Yass” and “Jeffery Yass” are one entity. 50 of the top 100 donors were fragmented across spellings before this step, so any ranking built on raw names was wrong.

Organizational donors

Individual donors

Organizational money by industry

Industry is assigned from each organizational donor's resolved name using the corrected rules in sponsors.py, and dollars count only contributions made directly to a candidate or candidate committee, so PAC-to-PAC layers are not added twice. “Unclassified” is mostly party committees, candidate-to-candidate transfers, and PACs named only for a firm. Donors = organizations with at least one direct contribution.

Following money through the PAC network

Most large Pennsylvania PACs are non-connected — they have no corporate sponsor by design, so “who sponsors it” is the wrong question. The right one is who funds them, and because those PACs are themselves recipients in this dataset, the answer was already in the data. Where one funder supplies 50% or more of a PAC's receipts, that becomes a directed edge and the chain is walked to its origin.

Money traced to an ultimate source

Each source is credited its pro-rata share of every PAC it funds, directly or through other PACs, and counted once, where the money leaves the PAC network — almost always to a candidate committee. “PACs reached” counts every PAC any fraction of the money passed through, however small. Bracketed rows are money that could not be traced to an origin: a PAC with no receipt data, a circular transfer, or a chain longer than the hop limit.

Chains

Read right to left: the highlighted box is the origin. Each dollar figure is that PAC's own gross outflow; the figures along one chain are successive layers of the same money and must not be added together.

Method, and what not to trust

Sources

PA Department of State full campaign finance export · City of Philadelphia campfin_contributions · FEC bulk files filtered to Pennsylvania. 3,411,881 rows ingested, 3,272,530 after removing duplicates, 1,350 reporting rollup lines excluded.

Committees funded mostly from outside Pennsylvania

90 committees that file in Pennsylvania raise most of their money from individuals outside the state: $150.2M of receipts, 13.7% of the total tracked. They are national employee PACs reporting nationwide payroll deductions and national political PACs; the largest are MOVEMENT VOTER PAC, INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF ELECTRICAL WORKERS POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE, Honeywell International Political Action Committee, JANE FONDA CLIMATE PAC, The Boeing Company Political Action Committee, The Home Depot Inc. Political Action Committee. The receipts are real and are counted, but it is money raised elsewhere that reaches Pennsylvania politicians only when these committees give here, and those gifts are counted again as contributions to the politician. Every committee is listed in outside_pa_committees.csv. A committee qualifies with at least 2,000 receipts, at least half from individuals with a non-Pennsylvania address.

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 at all; Philadelphia's is 92% “Not Specified”; only the FEC's entity code is dependable. Every row carries the method and a confidence score.

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 found 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.