Unless it's your job to do it regularly, finding out who the biggest contributors to, say, Sen. Marco Rubio are can be a little tough. Campaign finance data can be such a daunting maze that it discourages the public from independently researching candidates to find out which industries they're beholden to.
But a downloadable plug-in available for most browsers can change that. It's called Greenhouse and it was created by Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old computer programmer from Seattle. We first learned about it here.
How it works:
After you download the program (which takes about a second), whenever you're on a page in which a U.S. Senator or Congressman is mentioned, his or her name will automatically be highlighted. All you have to do is hover over the name with your cursor and a little box will pop up displaying the percentage of his or her campaign funding that comes from small donors, as well as a list of the top sectors from which donations to that candidate come from (and how much each has given).
Easy as that.
The program pulls in data from opensecrets.org, a website run by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit aimed at tracking campaign finance and its influence on elections. While Open Secrets is an excellent, comprehensive resource on many aspects of money in politics, the inexperienced researcher may have trouble finding what they need in less than a minute.
This app changes that.
Here's a statement Rubin issued on the Greenhouse Web site to coincide with the product's release:
It is my hope that providing increased transparency around the amount and source of funding of our elected representatives may play a small role in educating citizens and promoting change. If you use the extension when reading about a Congressional vote on energy policy, for example, maybe you’ll discover that a sponsor of a bill has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. Or maybe you'll learn that the top donors to a member of Congress who opposes tort reform are lawyers and law firms.
But while it's incredibly useful to have information on members of the Senate and U.S. Congress, the app doesn't (at least yet) cover lawmakers at the state level. That could also be quite useful, especially in Florida, where industries like sugar and electric utilities have an incredible amount of influence over lawmakers.
Then there are PACs and superPACS, which make it so that talking about who's donating to which campaign is only part of the story.
We imagine someday the app will pull in all available data within those realms as well, and hope that it does.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2015.