New Tool Empowers Tracking Campaign Money

There is a newly launched research tool to help voters in North Carolina know where polluting industries and shady “dark money” groups are directing their campaign money. It can also provide a faster look at where individual candidates are getting their campaign dollars overall.

It’s the North Carolina Campaign Finance Tracker, launched last week by the policy advocacy group Carolina Forward. The old political wisdom of doing candidate research by ‘following the money’ “requires knowing how much money our politicians raise; who gives to them, and when; what patterns there are and why they might exist. This is not an easy task to tackle, even for those who understand the somewhat byzantine world of campaign finance under U.S. and North Carolina state law,” suggests the group’s blog post. “It is both difficult for candidates and political committees to file reports, and even more difficult for the public to search them and understand what they mean. In nearly every way, it is a system designed to be impenetrable by non-experts.”

The NC Money Tracker online research tool “reorganizes and visualizes public data taken directly from the State Board of Elections to make it easy to discover, understand and analyze, so that anyone can have a better and clearer understanding the campaign finances of every North Carolina lawmaker.”

How Tracker Can Inform Your Vote

The tracker offers different ways to approach this understanding. 

For example, to whom is Duke Energy’s political committee giving money? 

Or why am I seeing all these ads by some group I’ve never heard of, telling me why a candidate is awful or great? 

Or what groups and categories of donors are the major backers of a candidate I’m considering – like Justice Anita Earls? 

One downside to the tool at this point is that it only lists incumbents among the candidates that it lists among the recipients. Hopefully, that can be added in the future. And keep in mind that you can get the best information on state candidates’ environmental records from NCLCV, and advice on the best candidates to support from NCLCV’s Conservation PAC.