This readme file was generated on 2026-11-06 by Adam Braffman 

# GENERAL INFORMATION

Title of Dataset: OpenSecrets state and select local data

Publisher: OpenSecrets

Coverage dates: The data range from 1990 to 2024.

# SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION

Access is restricted to NYU users only. You may not share, give, or sell this data to any other individual, organization, or educational institution outside of NYU without the express, prior, written consent of OpenSecrets. Please contact NYU Data Services if you need to provide a copy of a specific subset of this data to an external party for the purposes of peer review or replication review. You must cite OpenSecrets, and link to OpenSecrets.org, in any projects that make use of this data.

Per NYU's license agreement, you may not use this data for LLM training. If you wish to process any portion of this data using AI tools you may only use closed tools internal to NYU (such as NYU's licensed Google Gemini).

# DATA DESCRIPTION & SOURCES

The OpenSecrets State Data contains data from all 50 states (1990-2024) about contributions to candidates, political parties, and ballot measure committees; candidate expenditures and independent spending; and names of registered lobbyists/clients and lobbying expenditures.

The dataset also includes data for the following local races:
Washington, DC City Council, 2024 
Washington, DC School Board, 2024 
Chicago, IL	City Clerk 2023 
Chicago, IL	City Council 2023 
Chicago, IL	Mayor, 2023
Chicago, IL	Treasurer, 2023
New York City, NY City Council, 2023


# DATA & FILE OVERVIEW

## Documentation

The codebook is provided by OpenSecrets as a spreadsheet, `OpenSecrets State Data Codebook.xlsx`, and contains variable definitions for the data files. Tabs in the codebook spreadsheet correspond to sets of data files: Candidate Contributions to `candidate_contributions_*.csv`; Party Contributions to `party_contributions.csv`; Ballot Measure Contributions to `ballot_measure_contributions.csv`; Lobbyists to `Lobbyist_Registrations_*.csv`; etc.. The tab TransactionType contains definitions for the TransactionType and TransactionTypeID variables.

For more information about the creation of the data, please refer to https://www.opensecrets.org. For more information specifically about the contributor industry coding taxonomy, please refer to the Follow the Money site https://www.followthemoney.org/our-data/about-our-data.

## Files

Files are organized by OpenSecrets as comma-delimited text files. Candidate contributions and lobbyist registrations data are organized as single year files for all available years; officeholders data are organized as 3-5 year periods; all other files contain all available years. *Note: pre-2000 data is not as complete as post-2000. In particular, there is no candidate contributions file for 1991.*\

The table below shows the type of data file alongside the number of variables and the number of rows within all CSV files for that type of data file. A list of all CSV files available and their size follows.

| Name                         | Variables | Rows        |
|:-----------------------------|:----------|:------------|
| Ballot Measure Contributions | 34        | 1,850,964   |
| Candidate Contributions      | 50        | 59,930,332  |
| Candidate Expenditures       | 9         | 7,714,314   |
| Independent Spending         | 20        | 659,339     |
| Lobbying Expenditures        | 19        | 698,650     |
| Lobbyist Registrations       | 12        | 5,335,113   |
| Officeholders                | 42        | 113,182,527 |
| Party Contributions          | 37        | 3,554,632   |

\[65.9G\]  .\
├── \[529M\]  ballot\_measure\_contributions.csv\
├── \[ 35M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1990.csv\
├── \[ 46M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1992.csv\
├── \[1.6M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1993.csv\
├── \[ 75M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1994.csv\
├── \[ 10M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1995.csv\
├── \[265M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1996.csv\
├── \[8.8M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1997.csv\
├── \[871M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1998.csv\
├── \[ 53M\]  candidate\_contributions\_1999.csv\
├── \[694M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2000.csv\
├── \[ 39M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2001.csv\
├── \[1.1G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2002.csv\
├── \[ 89M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2003.csv\
├── \[814M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2004.csv\
├── \[ 49M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2005.csv\
├── \[1.3G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2006.csv\
├── \[130M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2007.csv\
├── \[886M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2008.csv\
├── \[ 57M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2009.csv\
├── \[1.4G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2010.csv\
├── \[197M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2011.csv\
├── \[1.1G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2012.csv\
├── \[180M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2013.csv\
├── \[1.4G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2014.csv\
├── \[150M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2015.csv\
├── \[937M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2016.csv\
├── \[146M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2017.csv\
├── \[2.0G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2018.csv\
├── \[168M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2019.csv\
├── \[1.8G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2020.csv\
├── \[338M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2021.csv\
├── \[3.7G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2022.csv\
├── \[233M\]  candidate\_contributions\_2023.csv\
├── \[1.4G\]  candidate\_contributions\_2024.csv\
├── \[747M\]  candidate\_expenditures.csv\
├── \[122M\]  independent\_spending.csv\
├── \[1.2G\]  lobbying\_expenditures.csv\
├── \[851K\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2000.csv\
├── \[944K\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2001.csv\
├── \[4.1M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2002.csv\
├── \[7.4M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2003.csv\
├── \[7.3M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2004.csv\
├── \[ 12M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2005.csv\
├── \[ 27M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2006.csv\
├── \[ 28M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2007.csv\
├── \[ 29M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2008.csv\
├── \[ 26M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2009.csv\
├── \[ 29M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2010.csv\
├── \[ 33M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2011.csv\
├── \[ 35M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2012.csv\
├── \[ 31M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2013.csv\
├── \[ 37M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2014.csv\
├── \[ 32M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2015.csv\
├── \[ 36M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2016.csv\
├── \[ 36M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2017.csv\
├── \[ 36M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2018.csv\
├── \[ 34M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2019.csv\
├── \[ 32M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2020.csv\
├── \[ 31M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2021.csv\
├── \[ 30M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2022.csv\
├── \[ 35M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2023.csv\
├── \[ 30M\]  Lobbyist\_Registrations\_2024.csv\
├── \[5.3G\]  officeholders\_2001-2005.csv\
├── \[6.9G\]  officeholders\_2006-2010.csv\
├── \[7.8G\]  officeholders\_2011-2014.csv\
├── \[8.7G\]  officeholders\_2015-2019.csv\
├── \[6.9G\]  officeholders\_2020-2025.csv\
├── \[1.1G\]  party\_contributions.csv\

## Methods

"Nearly all our data originates with an official government source, then we add value to it with additional processing and research. Congressional and presidential campaign finance data comes from the Federal Election Commission. Lobbying data comes from the Senate Office of Public Records. State-level campaign finance data comes from state agencies across the country. Information on 527 committees comes from the Internal Revenue Service. Travel and personal financial disclosures come from various information-collectors in Congress." -- OpenSecrets.org

OpenSecrets provided the data to NYU Libraries as comma-delimited text files.