About the Database
This database contains over 525,000 political fundraising emails collected from 2015 to 2025, with more than half originating from the high-activity years of 2022 and 2024. All emails were sent to a single Gmail account, providing a longitudinal view of political fundraising messages.
Peak Activity: More than 50% of messages were sent during 2022 and 2024, reflecting increased activity during election years.
Data Sources
The senders include a mix of political and advocacy organizations representing both major political parties:
- Federal political committees
- State and local political committees
- Political advocacy organizations
- Partisan news aggregators
- Issue-based organizations
- Some educational or commercial organizations with ideological ties
Data Characteristics
Each message includes comprehensive metadata and content analysis:
- Full message content with HTML-to-text conversion
- Sender information and domain extraction
- Political party affiliation detection
- Disclaimer presence identification
- URL extraction and cataloging
- Temporal metadata (date, time components)
Identifying Political Committees: The presence of disclaimers (phrases like "paid for by") is a reliable indicator distinguishing traditional political committees from advocacy organizations and other entities.
Technical Implementation
The database is built using Python and includes:
- SQLite database with full-text search capabilities
- Political party classification
- Domain-based sender identification
- Fundraising platform detection (ActBlue, WinRed, etc.)
- Hosting generously provided by Datasette Cloud