About & methodology
What Goydar is
Goydar is a source-backed public-record feed for reported campaign money flows, with amounts, recipients, committees, dates, association ranks, and filing evidence kept close to each card.
Wording we use
- reported contribution
- A contribution amount as reported in public campaign-finance records.
- reported independent expenditure
- An independent expenditure amount as reported in FEC or filing source evidence.
- reported transfer
- A committee transfer or related flow as reported in public source records.
- public record
- Source evidence available from FEC data or filing records.
V2/V3 totals
V2 totals include tracked committee reported contributions, reported earmarked or conduit flows, reported transfers, and tracked committee reported independent expenditures. V3 totals keep V2 totals separate and add aggregate-only reported contributions from qualified prior donor patterns connected to the tracked committee set.
Public donor research
Curated donor research pages publish names and totals from public FEC contributor records when a dataset has been intentionally imported for public review. Private-derived identifiers stay out of the UI.
What we don't publish
- Donor ZIPs
- Donor fingerprints
- Private source URLs
- Private V3 donor-network row details
- Records requiring blocking review, memo duplicates, superseded amendments, or unclassifiable independent-expenditure rows
Methodology
Included public records
- Reported direct and in-kind candidate contributions from approved tracked committees.
- Reported earmarked, conduit, transfer, and other candidate-facing committee flows classified for V2.
- Reported independent expenditures supporting or opposing candidates when support/oppose can be classified.
- Public source evidence, report dates, association ranks, methodology version, and source snapshot IDs.
Excluded records
- Individual donor ZIPs, donor fingerprints, private row-level donor records, and private source URLs.
- Unapproved tracked committees and records requiring blocking review.
- Memo duplicates, superseded amendments, and unclassifiable independent-expenditure rows.
- Private V3 donor-network aggregate rows outside the public V2 launch.
Methodology versioning
Methodology is versioned data. The current public methodology version is goydar-v2-v3-2026-01, covering V2 historical 2016-2026 public records.
The tracked committee methodology source is tracked-committees/v1.csv.
FEC contributor information must not be used to solicit contributions or for commercial donor lists.