The biggest line item in most races. Every broadcast buy leaves a contract in the station’s FCC public file: buyer, agency, flight dates, rate.
Florida Money Map
Campaign money does not stay money. It becomes invoices — to TV stations, consultants, mail shops, digital agencies, law firms, pollsters, data vendors, and compliance firms. The invoices are public records. This page is where we map them.
4 modules planned 0 live No invented dollar figures — ever
The Plain-English Version
How does a donation become an attack ad?
A donor writes a check to a campaign or a committee. That check gets reported — federal money to the FEC, state money to the Florida Division of Elections. Then the campaign spends it, and the spending gets reported too: who got paid, when, how much, and what for.
The ad you saw last night has a paper trail on both ends. The station that aired it filed the contract in its FCC public file. The committee that bought it itemized the payment in a disclosure report. If it ran on your phone instead of your TV, the Meta Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Center show who paid for it.
None of this is secret. It is just scattered across portals most people never open. The Money Map’s job is to pull it into one place for Florida’s races, with every name linked back to the filing it came from.
Where The Money Goes
Who actually gets the campaign’s money?
Strategy, general consulting, and the retainers that show up month after month on Schedule B — win or lose.
Print, postage, and list vendors. Mail money moves late and fast, and the invoices name the shop that built the hit piece.
Platform spend shows up in the Meta and Google ad libraries; the agencies that placed it show up in the disbursements.
Ballot fights, recounts, and compliance work. Legal spend spikes are a tell that a campaign expects a contested result.
Survey research line items tell you what a campaign is worried about — and which message they paid to test.
Voter file access, modeling, and analytics vendors. Quiet money, recurring invoices, few names the public ever hears.
Treasurers, accountants, and filing services — the people paid to keep the rest of this list technically legal.
The Modules
What will this page show you?
Four modules, each built on records anyone can check. Nothing renders a number until the pipeline behind it is live.
Data pipeline: pending
Who is buying the ads in your race?
Every broadcast TV and radio station has to file its political ad contracts in the FCC public file — buyer, agency, dates, and rate. Meta and Google publish who paid for the political ads on their platforms. When this module goes live, it will list the buyers behind the ads in each Florida race, with a link to the underlying filing for every name.
Where the records live:
Data pipeline: pending
Which vendor got paid after the attack ad?
Federal committees itemize who they pay on FEC Schedule B — vendor, date, amount, purpose. Florida committees file expenditures with the state Division of Elections. When this module goes live, it will line up attack-ad air dates against the disbursements that follow them, so you can see which consultant, media buyer, or production shop invoiced the hit.
Where the records live:
Data pipeline: pending
What changed after the money moved?
Contributions are timestamped public records. So are votes, contracts, and rule changes. When this module goes live, it will put the two timelines side by side — a check clears, and then a vote flips, a contract lands, or a rule quietly changes. No inference dressed up as fact: dates, documents, and the gap between them.
Where the records live:
Data pipeline: pending
Which race is getting expensive fast?
Filing velocity is a tell. When a race that raised quietly for months suddenly books seven figures in a reporting period, somebody decided it is winnable — or losable. When this module goes live, it will track period-over-period filing totals for Florida races and flag the ones accelerating, with the filings linked.
Where the records live:
Tip Line
Send a tip → Seen an invoice we should see?
Vendors, media buyers, treasurers, and campaign staff see this paper before anyone else does. If a payment didn’t match the work — or the work didn’t match the law — we want the document.