About The Donor Map
What This Is
The Donor Map is a donor-first model of American politics. It documents who funds whom, what they got for their money, and how the machinery connecting those two facts actually works.
The end product is a navigable database — 700+ politician profiles, 400+ donor profiles, and a growing map of the lobbying firms, think tanks, and media outlets that make the whole system run. Every connection sourced. Every claim cited. Every pipeline mapped from money in to policy out.
A journalist, researcher, congressional staffer, or engaged citizen can use this to see the full board at once: the donors, the politicians they fund, the policies that result, and the class interests that drive all of it.
This is not a blog. This is not opinion. This is an evidence base with an analytical framework.
The Four Pipelines
We track four pipelines:
The money pipeline — who donates, how much, and what policy outcomes follow. Every profile sourced from FEC filings, government records, and investigative journalism.
The lobbying pipeline — the intermediaries who deliver the ask. 22 K Street firms mapped with revolving door percentages, client lists, and conflict maps showing firms that lobby both sides of the same issue.
The policy pipeline — the think tanks and policy organizations that generate the talking points, the model legislation, and the intellectual cover. 27 think tanks mapped across the ideological spectrum with IRS 990 data and policy-to-legislation tracking.
The consent pipeline — the media personalities and outlets funded by the same donors who fund politicians. 50+ profiles mapped with FEC-verified contribution data and capture architecture analysis.
Why It’s Built This Way
The people who fund American politics have spent decades building the architecture to keep that funding invisible. Campaign finance is fragmented across agencies that don’t talk to each other. Dark money flows through entities that never disclose their donors. Lobbying disclosures arrive months late with exemptions wide enough to drive entire industries through. Shell companies stacked on shell companies. Trusts that hide ownership. The opacity isn’t a bug. It’s the product.
They know everything about us. Credit scores, commute patterns, purchase histories, social graphs — every transaction captured, scored, and sold. They justified it with words like accountability and risk management. Words they only ever point downward.
This database uses the same logic pointed back up.
FEC filings are their location data. Lobbying disclosures are their purchase history. Revolving door moves are their social graph. Committee assignments are their commute patterns. Donation-to-policy timelines are their behavioral profiles. The same kind of tracking they built to watch us — reassembled from public records and aimed at the people who actually control the outcomes.
Independence
This is not built by an institution. There is no newsroom behind this. No think tank budget. No graduate fellowship. No nonprofit board filled with the same donors this database tracks.
This is built by a working-class person who got tired. Tired of the corruption. Tired of the dark money. Tired of the propaganda that keeps us locked in the same duopoly, serving the same people every single cycle. I got tired of waiting for someone to build this, so I started building it myself.
The accountability side has FOIA requests and underfunded journalists. The donor class has entire industries dedicated to keeping their influence invisible. That gap exists on purpose. This project is one attempt to close it.
Every claim is cited. Every source is tiered by reliability. Every FEC number comes directly from the government API. The methodology is documented and open. Click any claim. Verify it yourself.
This project is not affiliated with any political party, campaign, PAC, media outlet, or donor. The framework is class analysis, not partisanship. Democrats and Republicans are both documented here. The money does not care about party. Neither does this database.
Source Standards
Every claim is cited. Every source is tiered by reliability:
| Tier | What It Means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Primary documents, government records | FEC filings, FPPC records, court documents, voting records |
| Tier 2 | Major investigative journalism | ProPublica, The Intercept, LA Times, Washington Post |
| Tier 3 | Secondary reporting, named sources | Ballotpedia, Wikipedia, specialist trade press |
| Tier 4 | Partisan or single-sourced | Flagged explicitly — verify independently |
If a claim doesn’t have a source, it doesn’t belong here. This is the paper trail.
Support This Project
No advertisers. No corporate sponsors. No PAC money. Just the paper trail, pointed upward.
If this kind of work matters to you, support it directly:
Support on Patreon →
Built in Obsidian. Published via Obsidian Publish. Sourced from public records.
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