Investigating Sacramento Campaign Finance Data with Streamlit

My Streamlit app (available here) aggregates public campaign finance disclosures and allows users to sift through and analyze the data with a high degree of granularity to gain insights into how our local political campaigns are financed. Here is a quick tutorial of how you may use the tool:

The “Campaigns/PACs-all years” column was created by stripping all campaign or committee names of any trailing date, for example “Eric Guerra for City Council 2024” and “Eric Guerra for City Council 2020” are both represented in the “Campaigns/PACs-all years” column as “Eric Guerra for City Council” to allow for the aggregation of contributions accross multiple campaigns. Selecting “Campaigns/PACs-all years” as the aggregating category for the bar chart therefore enables us to more easily analyze elected officials’ campaign contributions across multiple elections. The resulting bar chart shows that Darrell Steinberg’s mayoral campaign “Steinberg for Sacramento Mayor” has raked in more cash than any other campaign or committee with $3.2 million in total contributions. However, you may notice the 14th most expensive campaign or committee is also in support of Steinberg, “Mayor Darrell Steinberg Committee for Sacramento’s Future.” Let’s dive a little deeper into these two.

We can filter the dataset by “Steinberg for Sacramento Mayor” in the “Campaigns/PACs-all years” field on the left to investigate the contributions made to that particular campaign accross all years. Aggregating the bar chart based on “Contributor Last Name” reveals that campaign’s top contributors which are mostly trade unions, professional associations, and other special interest groups. However, the top congributor by aggregated last name is “Barkett” with a total of $23,000.

If we also filter “Contributor Last Name” by “Barkett” we can see in the resulting filtered dataset that the “Barkett” contributions correspond to a family from La Jolla, California:

Toggling the campaign’s contributions by date instead of year reveals that interestingly, $1.4 million out of the campaign’s $3.2 million total came on a single day: March 22, 2016, which at face value seems odd and worth investigating further:

When filtering for “Mayor Darrell Steinberg Committee for Sacramento’s Future” we can see that despite totalling less than a third of the amount raised for “Steinberg for Sacramento Mayor,” the total contributions by last name to this committee are much larger, with “Members’ Voice of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California” as the top contributor at $110,722.

Filtering the entire dataset for “Members’ Voice of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California” under “Contributor Last Name” and aggregating the bar chart on “Campaigns/PACs-all years” shows that the committee has only ever contributed to Steinberg’s mayoral campaign, campaigns in support of local ballot measures A and U, and to a campaign in opposition to measure G.

The resulting filtered dataset:

We can also see that the “Contributor Type” for contributors to “Mayor Darrell Steinberg Committee for Sacramento’s Future” are most frequently other committees,

Whereas the “Contributor Type” for “Steinberg for Sacramento Mayor” is most frequently “other.”

You may find my public Github repository for the project here