fec-quarterly's Introduction

FEC Quarterly Filings

Gathering FEC filing summaries for competitive 2020 races at the quarterly deadlines.

Created by George LeVines ([email protected])

Project goal

Save some time reporting on quarterly summaries for competitive races.

Project notes

You need fec-loader.
FEC loader needs PostgresQL.
In postgres you need the standard localhost database called postgres with user postgres and no password.
Do python stuff by running pipenv install and pipenv shell from the project root after cloning.

People involved

Political reporters Simone Pathé and Bridget Bowman gathered list of candidate committee IDs.
Ilana Marcus helped with bash script.
NewsNerds #campfin helped with various FEC filing questions.
And Chris Zubak-Skees built this miracle thing.

Technical

After cloning the git repo:

From the command line in the root director.
- Run pipenv install then pipenv shell then jupyter-lab, which should open an iPython Notebook in your browser.
Open analysis/fec_files.ipynb.
Follow the instructions there, running each cell as you go.
Find your output in data/processed.

Data sources

FEC filings data

NOTE
While it's possible to download bulk(ish) raw data from https://www.fec.gov/data/filings/?data_type=efiling often the number of listed items is not the number of rows that will come out in your CSV (especially true on a filing deadline day). One way around this seems to be to fill in some date parameters that are outside the bounds of the dates you are interested in.

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