During this year’s primary elections, then-auditor candidate Dale Whitaker paid nearly $13,000 to send hundreds of thousands of texts to Spokane County voters. One of his opponents, Spokane City Council Member Michael Cathcart, listed 75 pieces of rebar under campaign expenditures.
Sheriff John Nowels has raised nearly $60,000 this year to run his race — unopposed.
Conservative megadonor Larry Stone gambled away over $100,000 of his manufacturing fortune by donating to a committee opposing the local transit authority’s tax renewal. It passed anyway.
Incumbent legislative candidate Natasha Hill spent $500 for the billboard design and social media campaign proclaiming she “has great jeans,” a spoof on the controversial ad from fellow Spokane blue-jean-wearer Sydney Sweeney. Meanwhile, her seatmate hopeful, Luc Jasmin III, spent $43.60 to buy 80 Pride flags from Amazon.com.
Prosecutor candidate Preston McCollam shelled out $36.85 for legal pads and a new pen, and another $544.99 for a new laptop. State legislative candidate Jonathan Bingle spent $1,537.18 on “phone and phone accessories.”
Republican candidates held fundraising events at places like David’s Pizza and The Steam Plant, while Democrats chose Cascadia Public House and Jewel of the North.
We found all this information without making a single phone call — and you can too! The Washington State Public Disclosure Commission’s website is a treasure trove of information for the morbidly nosy and the professionally probing alike.
A candidate’s favorite caterer, what parades they marched in and who donates to their campaign can all be found by digging through the records filed to the PDC.
If you want to learn to use the PDC like a journalist, read on.
Candidate curiosities
To start your search, go to the “Candidates” page on the PDC. Once you’re here, you have your pick of the litter — you can look for a specific candidate you want the goss on, or you can filter by different categories, like every candidate running for a specific race, or every candidate of a certain party. For example, there are 74 independents running for state or local races in Washington this year, and three of them are local.
Once you have chosen a specific candidate you want to dive deeper on, here are the kinds of things you can find about them:
- The Basics: information like their party, when they registered their candidacy and their campaign email.
- Finance Overview: a bare-bones snapshot of their campaign’s finances, like how much money they’ve raised and spent, and whether they’ve taken on any debt.
- Contributions: an itemized look at who has contributed to their campaign and how much they gave
- Expenditures: an itemized list of what has the candidate spent money on and how much
- Debts, Loans and Pledges: tabs that show candidates’ campaign debts and loans
- Independent Expenditures: a breakdown of outside money spent in the race either for or against the candidate.
The PDC also allows you to download most of their datasets, which empowers the most obsessive public information fangirl to do their own customized analyses. At RANGE, here are some of the things we look for when analyzing a candidate’s campaign contributions:
- Are their donations coming from large donors maxing out their individual contributions — $2,400 or $1,200, depending on the race — or small donations? This can show how much support a candidate is getting from the working class, and how much from people who can afford to drop $1,200 in political donations.
- What about political action committees (PACs) and businesses? How much of a candidate’s total contributions came from individuals? This can indicate whether a candidate is more tied to their constituents or special interest groups.
- Are their donations coming from themself? If most of a candidate’s warchest is just a loan from themselves to their campaign, it might demonstrate a lack of support from constituents.
- Are their donations coming from the area they want to serve? This one requires a bit more Excel-heavy work, but you can download a .csv file of a candidate’s contributions, then sort by zip code or address to determine the proportion of financial support actually coming from their potential constituents.
If you switch to the “Expenditures” tab on a candidate’s page, there’s even more to look at. You can see how much they’re paying their campaign managers, how much they’re spending on candy to hand out at parades (exactly $395.56 if you’re Cathcart), and how much they’re spending on printing and design services. Is their primary campaign strategy billboards? Yard signs? Sending thousands of targeted texts? You can answer all those questions by scrolling through a candidate’s expenditures list.
Sometimes you spot interesting tidbits, like candidates using their funds for charitable giving: Incumbent Hill gave about $205 to the ACLU of Washington, described as “charity donation for campaign support,” while Bingle gave about one dollar more to the Spokane GOP, characterized as “charity.”
If your candidate curiosity still isn’t sated, there are more places to dig. All candidates have to submit a filing form, which is typically linked in the overview section of the candidate profile. On the registration form, you can often find a candidate email, and contact information for their treasurer and campaign manager. If you have any additional questions about the candidate that the PDC can’t answer, those people usually can!
Peeping on the PACs
Your local candidate is going to appear on your ballot; your local political action committee is not. And yet, these committees often have an outsized influence on elections, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into funding candidate war chests, supporting or opposing ballot measures and running independent attack ads. You can peel back the curtains on their smoke-filled rooms by becoming a PDC wizard.
“Independent expenditure spending” can contain some of the most revealing tidbits . Some of the highest spending in local races often comes via these independent PAC expenditures — purchased, supposedly, without direct coordination with a campaign — instead of from the individual campaigns.
If you’re getting 5 million annoying YouTube ads telling you to vote for someone and you want to know who to be annoyed with, first check a candidate’s regular expenditures. If you don’t see it there, it might lie within their independent expenditures, where you can see if a PAC or individual has spent independently to support or oppose that candidate.
In this year’s local races, independent expenditures are currently under a grand, with just $735.65 logged — all from Fuse Votes WA committee. Some years, though, that spending goes crazy, like in 2023 when roughly $2 million in independent expenditure funds were spent in Spokane, or last year, when conservative PACs funneled nearly $100,000 into a city council candidate (he lost).
It’s a little tricky to know exactly which PACs are active in your area, but one trick is to go to the “committees” page, and filter by county and year. It isn’t a perfect method. If committees registered in different counties are spending in local elections, this won’t capture them. You can also check by jurisdiction or go granularly specific and search by candidate, though, and this will tell you any PAC influencing those races.
While candidates have campaigns to donate to, ballot measures do not, which means that all spending to support or oppose ballot measures goes through PACs. You can usually find these by using the method above. They’ll be categorized as “Local Ballot Measure” committee, or sometimes a “Continuing Committee” if they support things like levies or bonds for a specific jurisdiction that run repeatedly.
By looking at those PAC details, you can learn things like the Washington Trust Bank donated $50,000 to the committee in charge of running the transit tax renewal opposition campaign, while not a single contribution to the Yes for Buses PAC was over $10,000 — and most were under $5,000.
Other things you can use the PDC for
You can do even more than just getting rote data on spending, contributions and independent expenditures using the PDC website. Here’s a list of examples of how we’ve used it to get your creative citizen journalist juices flowing:
- Which prosecutor candidate do attorneys prefer? What about social workers? Cops? You can search to see what candidates in your area people of certain occupations are donating to. You can get even more granular and search by specific employer, too. Spokane County lawyers seems to really love their current boss, McCollam.
- We noticed a few large donors’ names appearing frequently. You can see just how much they’ve donated — ever — by going to the “Contributions” tab and searching their name and business’s name(s). For example, frequent donor Stone has contributed nearly $1 million to candidates and PACs since 2009, with most of those donations coming in the past seven years.
- Want to know which candidates are supporting each other’s campaigns? You can search candidates’ names in the contributions section too, and learn things like that independent prosecutor candidate Danny Tarkenton donated to Democrat auditor candidate Callie Gee, but Gee didn’t donate back.
- Check in on the local power players and their political donations. Which candidates are they supporting? For example, Avista, who was in talks with potential data center developers, gave large contributions to Hunter Abell, Luc Jasmin III, Michael Cathcart, John Nowels and Natasha Hill, among others.
- Are you getting mailers and you’re curious who sent them and who paid for them? Mailers are required to list their funders on them, which you can then look up on the PDC (though sometimes, the wrong committee is listed, which is a violation.)
- You can use the above method to see who your friends, neighbors and enemies are contributing to politically as well. Your Tinder date says they’re “apolitical?” Look their name up on the PDC. Hell, if you can get his birthday, you can check if he votes regularly, but that’s on a different website…
- There are local lobbyists working to push legislators to vote one way or another on issues. You can look them up on the PDC website here, and see which businesses are hiring them!
- If you’re wondering who is bad at following the rules, you can search the PDC’s enforcement portal and see who has received complaints, and what the verdict was on those complaints. You can also report violations yourself, like if you notice campaigns using AI tech to create deepfake video or photos of other candidates, which is against state laws. Just a note: this doesn’t apply to generating pics of candidates as Voldemort, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, according to PDC spokesperson Natalie Johnson.
- You can see Washington’s most notorious rules lawyers and PDC hawks, like Conner Edwards, an Olympia-based lawyer who has filed over 1,300 PDC complaints. Edwards was also on the payroll of local candidates Dave Lucas and Isaiah Paine, eliminated in the primaries, who hired him to do accounting and regulatory compliance.
- You can learn more about the PDC itself, watch their meetings, and read up on the commission members.
