FEC Campaign Finance Scraper – Candidates & Financial Totals

Search US federal candidates (House, Senate, President) by name, state, office, party and election cycle, and get each candidate's campaign financial totals — receipts, disbursements, cash on hand, individual contributions — in one row. Powered by the FEC's official api.open.fec.gov disclosure API. No login, no browser, no API key of your own required.

Use cases

• Political/campaign research — pull every Senate candidate in a state with their fundraising totals in a single dataset instead of clicking through fec.gov one candidate at a time.
• Journalism & fact-checking — compare receipts, burn rate (disbursements vs receipts) and war chests (cashOnHandEnd) across a race, with the FEC page URL attached to each row for citation.
• Watchdog & transparency dashboards — schedule a run per cycle and diff the totals to track who is raising money and how fast.
• Small-dollar vs. large-dollar analysis — individualUnitemizedContributions (small-dollar giving as the FEC itself computes it, no subtraction required) against individualItemizedContributions (the >$200-aggregate subset) shows how much of a campaign's money comes from grassroots donors versus large ones.
• Candidate list building — enumerate everyone who has ever filed for a given office/state/cycle, including long-shot and prior candidates.

Input

Field	Type	Description
candidateName	string	Full or partial name to search for (default "Warren"). Matches any part of the name — see the FAQ.
state	string	2-letter state code, e.g. "CA". Optional.
office	string	H (House), S (Senate), P (President). Optional.
party	string	Party code, e.g. DEM, REP, IND, LIB. Optional.
electionYear	integer	Even-numbered election cycle, e.g. 2024. Optional.
includeTotals	boolean	Fetch financial totals per candidate (default true). Costs one extra request per candidate.
maxResults	integer	Stop after this many candidates (default 20, max 500).

Example: Massachusetts Senate Democrats in the 2024 cycle

{
  "state": "MA",
  "office": "S",
  "party": "DEM",
  "electionYear": 2024,
  "includeTotals": true,
  "maxResults": 50
}

Leave candidateName empty to browse by filters alone instead of searching by name.

Output

One item per candidate:

Field	Description
candidateId	FEC candidate ID, e.g. S2MA00170. Stable across cycles — use it as your join key.
name	Name as filed, LAST, FIRST MIDDLE, uppercase.
party	Full party name, e.g. DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
office	House, Senate or President.
state, district	State code and 2-digit district (00 for President, Senate and at-large House).
incumbentChallenge	Incumbent, Challenger or Open seat (null for some older filings).
candidateStatus	One-letter FEC code — see the FAQ for the decode table.
electionYears	Years this person has actually been a candidate for.
cycles	Every two-year cycle the FEC holds data for. Not the same as electionYears.
firstFileDate	Date of their first FEC filing.
fecUrl	Link to the candidate's page on fec.gov.
receipts, disbursements	Total raised and total spent for the covered period, in USD.
cashOnHandEnd	Cash on hand at the close of the covered period.
individualContributions	All contributions from individuals.
individualItemizedContributions	The itemized (>$200 aggregate) subset of the above.
individualUnitemizedContributions	The unitemized (small-dollar, ≤$200 aggregate) subset — the FEC's own computed figure, not derived by subtraction.
refundedIndividualContributions	Individual contributions refunded back to donors during the period.
coverageStartDate, coverageEndDate	The reporting period these totals cover, as ISO timestamps.

Financial fields are null when includeTotals is false or the candidate has never filed a financial report.

Sample row (real output, Elizabeth Warren, Senate)

{
  "candidateId": "S2MA00170",
  "name": "WARREN, ELIZABETH",
  "party": "DEMOCRATIC PARTY",
  "office": "Senate",
  "state": "MA",
  "district": "00",
  "incumbentChallenge": "Incumbent",
  "candidateStatus": "C",
  "electionYears": [2012, 2018, 2024, 2030],
  "cycles": [2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026],
  "firstFileDate": "2011-08-19",
  "fecUrl": "https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/S2MA00170/",
  "receipts": 4413931.4,
  "disbursements": 4109645.05,
  "cashOnHandEnd": 3754333.02,
  "individualContributions": 4234605.7,
  "individualItemizedContributions": 1373252.85,
  "individualUnitemizedContributions": 2861352.85,
  "refundedIndividualContributions": 30368.08,
  "coverageStartDate": "2025-01-01T00:00:00",
  "coverageEndDate": "2026-06-30T00:00:00"
}

Pricing

result — you are charged per candidate row actually returned. Starting a run is free, and a run that finds no matching candidates costs nothing. HTTP-only (no browser), so runs are fast and cheap.

FAQ

Why does searching "Warren" return people who aren't named Warren? The FEC's search matches the token anywhere in the filed name, including middle names. A Senate search for Warren returns 27 candidates, and the first ones alphabetically are BOYANTON, RICHARD WARREN and BROWN, WARREN P — not Elizabeth Warren. Search the full name ("Elizabeth Warren") to narrow it: all tokens must match.

What do the candidateStatus letters mean? Straight from the FEC: C = present candidate, F = future candidate, N = not yet a candidate, P = prior candidate. party, office and incumbentChallenge are already decoded to readable text for you; this one field stays as the FEC's raw code so it round-trips cleanly back into FEC queries.

Why is district "00" for a Senator? 00 is the FEC's placeholder for offices that have no House district — President, Senate, and at-large House seats.

Are receipts lifetime totals? No. The FEC stores one totals record per election cycle, and this Actor returns the most recent one, with coverageStartDate/coverageEndDate telling you exactly which period it covers. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has 12 separate totals records on file. If you need a specific past cycle, set electionYear.

Do I have to compute small-dollar giving myself? No. individualUnitemizedContributions is the FEC's own ≤$200-aggregate figure, returned straight from the same totals record as individualItemizedContributions — you don't need to subtract one from individualContributions to get it.

Why do electionYears and cycles differ? electionYears are the years the person was on the ballot; cycles are every two-year window the FEC holds data for, which includes the off-years in between. In the sample above that's [2012, 2018, 2024, 2030] versus [2012 … 2026].

Do I need my own FEC API key? No. The Actor ships with its own api.data.gov key, so you are not sharing the throttled public DEMO_KEY with every other caller on the internet.

Is this legal? Yes. Federal campaign finance filings are public records that candidates are legally required to disclose, and this reads them from the FEC's own public API. No login, no scraping behind authentication.

Can I get individual donors' names and addresses? Not from this Actor. It returns candidate-level aggregates only.

Notes

Only public data from the FEC's own public disclosure API. Issues or feature requests: support@fetchsmith.com. Also available as a hosted API at https://fetchsmith.com

Related guides

• FEC Campaign Finance JSON API — what the DEMO_KEY actually lets you do
• All FetchSmith tools

Source code

https://github.com/Fetchsmith/fetchsmith/tree/main/actors/fec-campaign-finance-scraper