FEC Disbursement Data • Federal Election Commission • 2023-2024 Cycle
In the 2024 election cycle, federal candidates, parties, and outside groups spent an estimated $15.9 billion, making it the most expensive federal election in U.S. history (FEC 24-month summary). Democrats raised substantially more through formal campaign and party channels, though Republicans and conservative-aligned groups had a significant advantage in super PAC and outside spending (Brennan Center).
This dashboard focuses on one narrower but increasingly important piece of that broader political economy: digital and civic-tech spending.
That focus is analytically useful because campaigning now relies heavily on privately owned digital infrastructure. Adam Sheingate’s (2016) account of the “business of politics” is helpful here: campaigns are not only electoral organizations but also markets for specialized political services.
From that perspective, digital and civic-tech vendors matter not just because they absorb significant resources, but because they shape how campaigns know, classify, and retain their publics. These tools can generate powerful private assets while making it harder to build shared civic infrastructure, cumulative datasets, and research tools oriented toward democratic learning rather than client retention.
Looking at these vendors helps show how campaign resources are routed through firms that monetize political infrastructure and accumulate organizational data, even when those expenditures do not build durable civic capacity for citizens themselves.
A note on interpretation: These figures should be read as measures of FEC-visible campaign cashflows through different kinds of political vendors, not as directly comparable measures of vendor revenue, profit, or organizational importance.
In the disbursements captured here, WinRed spending is highly concentrated in Trump committees. This likely reflects both the scale of Trump’s fundraising operation and the way platform-related transactions are reported in FEC filings. It should not be taken to mean that other Republican campaigns were not using WinRed.
DNC and party infrastructure committees account for most of the NGP VAN and EveryAction spending visible here. This suggests a relatively centralized Democratic CRM model in federal filings, though the contrast with Republicans should be interpreted cautiously because Republican data infrastructure is distributed across more providers and is less fully visible in FEC disbursement data.
Harris’s $81M in tech spending across ActBlue ($76M), NGP VAN ($2.6M), and EveryAction ($1.7M) built on Biden’s existing vendor relationships. Biden’s committees show $52M, mostly through ActBlue ($47M). The mid-cycle transition represented a large-scale migration of campaign technology infrastructure between candidates.
Unlike WinRed, whose disbursements are highly concentrated in Trump committees in these data, Anedot appears across a wider range of Republican federal campaigns: Cruz ($1.1M), Moreno ($0.9M), Lake ($0.7M), Ramaswamy ($0.6M), and dozens more. In that sense, the federal disbursement record suggests a more distributed pattern of Republican fundraising-platform use.
In platform-reported Meta and Google advertising data, Democratic presidential spending substantially exceeded Republican presidential spending in 2024. That disparity is clear in transparency datasets, though its electoral significance is harder to infer.
The Trump campaign reported lower direct digital ad spending than Harris in the platform transparency data reviewed here. Contemporary reporting suggests a greater reliance on organic reach, earned media, and allied outside spending, though the relative contribution of these channels cannot be cleanly recovered from FEC data alone.
Most digital ad money flows through intermediary media buying firms, not directly to platforms. These FEC-reported vendor payments represent the actual money trail:
ActBlue, WinRed, Anedot, and Revv capture a large share of the major federal fundraising platforms visible in FEC disbursement data, though this should not be read as a complete measure of all online fundraising infrastructure.
NGP VAN and EveryAction account for most Democratic CRM spending visible in the federal disbursement data assembled here.
Republican CRM and voter-data spending is only partially visible in these data. Some expenditures appear to be distributed across smaller vendors, embedded in party or committee overhead, or otherwise not easily recoverable through the vendor-level FEC queries used here.
This category tracks several of the largest digital-native consulting firms visible in FEC vendor data, while excluding TV-dominant media-buying firms and many smaller shops. It should be interpreted as a substantial but incomplete view of the digital consulting market.
Scale to Win, RumbleUp, and Hustle account for a substantial share of the SMS/P2P texting vendors captured here, but other providers are omitted. This category should therefore be read as broad coverage rather than a complete census.
Direct FEC payments to Google and Meta capture only a small fraction of total platform-reported digital advertising, because most purchases are routed through intermediary media-buying firms. For digital ads, platform transparency data and FEC vendor disbursements measure different parts of the same market.
| Fundraising Platforms | $643.8M | FEC API |
| Digital Consulting | $235.2M | OpenSecrets |
| CRM / Voter File | $107.5M | FEC API |
| SMS / P2P Texting | $53.7M | OpenSecrets |
| Digital Ad Platforms (direct to vendor) | $96.2M | OpenSecrets |
| Data / Analytics | $12.4M | OpenSecrets |
| Platform-reported digital ads (Meta+Google) | ~$1.35B | Separate |
| TV/Radio ad spending & media buying firms | ~$5B+ | Not included |
| Smaller consulting firms (<$5M) | ~$500M est. | Not included |
| State/local campaign tech | Unknown | Not included |
| Dark money digital spending | ~$281M | Not trackable |
| R Platform | FEC Amount | Role | Usage (2024 survey) |
|---|---|---|---|
| GOP Data Trust | $7.0M | RNC voter file, 5,000+ campaigns served | 53% of R professionals |
| i360 | $4.3M | Koch-backed data/analytics, 270M profiles | 37% of R professionals |
| Campaign Sidekick | Est. $2-5M | #1 voter contact app, built by R operatives | 44% of R professionals |
| Advantage | Est. $1-3M | Voter contact / canvassing app | 27% of R professionals |
Note: Republican data infrastructure costs are partially subsidized through party committees and affiliated networks, resulting in lower FEC-visible spending. Pricing structures across all CRM vendors (Democratic and Republican) are not publicly comparable. 82% of Republican campaign professionals say data makes a tactical difference, but only 38% say their data is accurate (Center for Campaign Innovation, 2024 post-election survey).
FEC OpenFEC API: Direct schedule_b/by_recipient queries for ActBlue, WinRed, NGP VAN, Anedot, EveryAction, Revv (batch of 600 records, DEMO_KEY).
OpenSecrets: Vendor profiles for Targeted Victory, Bully Pulpit Interactive, Scale to Win, RumbleUp, Hustle, Catalist, i360, Axiom Strategies, Majority Strategies, Push Digital, Google Inc, Meta, GOP Data Trust (FEC data through June 2025).
Brennan Center / OpenSecrets / Wesleyan Media Project: Platform-reported political ad transparency data from Meta, Google, Snap, X ($1.9B total).
NPR, Search Engine Land, Bellingcat, Syracuse ElectionGraph: Harris vs Trump ad spending breakdowns.
Center for Campaign Innovation: 2024 post-election Republican technology survey data.