Research Tools: OpenSecrets Launches Database to Explore the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Money-in-Politics

From the Center for Responsive Politics:

The Center for Responsive Politics is pleased to announce our new Gender and Race section, which was made possible in part by the US 2050 initiative, supported by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

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This section of our site will host a variety of features on gender and race — including a tool to help understand how gender, race, incumbency, and party affect a candidate’s fundraising success, the data we collect on female and male donors, the demographics of Congress, and detailed gender and race analyses that come from the Center for Responsive Politics.

We have long maintained a comprehensive database of the gender of all federal candidates, and we are now introducing candidate-verified race as a variable in our data. [Our emphasis] This is the first publicly-available source that combines gender, race and campaign fundraising totals into one coherent database.

This database will provide an invaluable resource for scholars, policymakers, the media and voters — a tool designed to help with the study and reporting on the gender and race dynamics of the U.S. campaign finance system.

To measure the relationship between campaign fundraising, gender and race, we conducted a demographic survey of every federal candidate in the 2018 midterms and combined that information with the fundraising data from the Federal Election Commission we house at CRP. Learn more about our methodology here.

For 35 years, the Center for Responsive Politics has empowered citizens with information and helped propel the discussion on transparency in governance, and CRP’s in-depth research and analysis reveal important facts about how our nation’s politics and policies are shaped. To that end, examining the influence gender and race have in politics — whether candidates, constituents, or donors — is especially significant today.

The Center for Responsive Politics’ development of a critically needed publicly available database designed to assist the explorations of the intersections of race, gender and money in politics is particularly timely as we look ahead to 2020 and beyond. We are seeing more women and non-white candidates than ever before, documenting record-breaking progress made by female donors and witnessing increased influence by a diversifying electorate, making this publicly available demographic data crucial.

Direct to Gender, Race and Money-in-Politics Database

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