Methodology
Every number on this site comes from Federal Election Commission filings and can be reproduced on fec.gov. This page says exactly what goes into a card, what stays out, and how to check us.
A politician's figure is their career total from the pro-Israel lobby: every dollar the 97 committees below, and the lobby's biggest individual donors, have put into every federal campaign that person has ever run, in every FEC election cycle on file (1980 to today). It is built from four layers. Each layer is listed separately for every politician in the public report.
Every FEC Schedule B disbursement from a tracked committee to any of the politician's own campaign committees (principal or authorized, plus joint fundraising committees that raise for one candidate, even when a party committee shares the account, since an earmarked check to "Trump Victory" or "Harris Victory Fund" was written for the candidate on the label; joint fundraising committees shared between two candidates, or whose name reads like a leadership PAC, are left out until someone attributes them by hand), net of refunds. This includes the earmarked checks the PACs bundle and pass through: when AIPAC PAC, NORPAC, or JStreetPAC collects a donor's check and forwards it to a campaign, the PAC reports it on its own Schedule B and we count it. That is most of the money. We read the raw filing rows, not the FEC's summary tables, because the summary tables drop bundled checks (for Ted Cruz's 2024 campaign the FEC's aggregate shows $8,500 from AIPAC PAC; the raw rows show 779 checks totaling $726,146).
Three matching rules keep this honest. A committee is matched by what it was in the cycle the check arrived, not by what it is today: when a politician turns a retired campaign committee into a PAC, the FEC keeps the old ID, and money that went to the campaign in earlier cycles still counts (Friends of Sherrod Brown, now "Dignity of Work PAC"), while money that arrived after the conversion does not. When a PAC's filing tags a check with a candidate ID we do not carry, the check is credited to the campaign committee that cashed it, if that committee belongs to one of our politicians by both ID and name (this catches a person's second FEC ID, and the occasional check filed under the wrong candidate). And a handful of attributions the filings alone cannot make (a PAC that keeps sending earmarked checks under a candidate's retired committee number; a joint fundraising committee shared by two politicians of the same surname) are made by hand and published in the pipeline with the evidence.
Every FEC Schedule E independent expenditure by a tracked committee supporting the politician (ads, mailers, canvassing), using the FEC's own deduplicated per-candidate totals so amended filings are not double-counted. We read this layer from the 2008 cycle onward (Layer 1 goes back to 1980). And, following the rule we set in KY-04 and Michigan: when the same lobby group (AIPAC PAC + United Democracy Project; DMFI PAC + its IE arm; RJC-PAC + RJC Victory Fund; the three Pro-Israel America committees; the three J Street committees) spends money attacking an opponent in a race where it backed exactly one candidate, that attack spending is credited to the candidate it was spent to elect. "Backed" means the group ran ads for that candidate; if it ran ads for nobody, it means the group gave to that candidate and no other. When a group gave to several candidates in a race but advertised for only one, the ads decide (RJC-PAC gave to eight Republican hopefuls in 2024 while RJC Victory Fund advertised only for Trump, so its $10.1 million against Biden and Harris is Trump's). If a group attacked someone without backing anyone in that race, the money is listed in our review file and credited to nobody.
Some spending arrives through committees with local-sounding names ("MAGA KY," "Elect Chicago Women," "Security Is Strength") that are not pro-Israel PACs on paper. We count that spending only when the committee's own FEC donor filings show its money came mainly from the pro-Israel donors we track or from a tracked PAC, and only after a hand review that is published on the Receipts page with committee IDs. Committees that fail the test are not counted, even when the number would be big (see Cruz: $3.9M rejected).
Direct gifts to the politician's campaigns from individuals who have given at least $50,000 to the lobby's committees, per those committees' own FEC Schedule A filings. The roster is built from 24 of the 97 committees (the national PACs and super PACs with recent filings) and from the 2016 cycle onward; the legacy PACs in the rest of the table have not yet been swept for donors, so this layer can only run low. It holds 713 people as of September 2026. Every roster donor's gifts are itemized per politician in donor.json; the roster file itself is published with each quarterly refresh. A gift is counted only when the donor's name and state match and their ZIP code or employer corroborates the match; checks routed through a tracked PAC are excluded here because they are already in Layer 1. This layer is added only to politicians the PACs already fund. A mega-donor's personal check never creates a nonzero card by itself, so a $182 gift to a member the lobby is trying to defeat does not become "Israel lobby money."
The most widely shared "Israel lobby money" figures come, directly or second-hand, from OpenSecrets' Pro-Israel industry total. That total adds up PAC money and personal checks from every individual donor OpenSecrets classifies as pro-Israel. Ours does not work that way. A personal check counts here only when the donor is on the mega-donor roster (Layer 4: at least $50,000 given to the tracked committees, per those committees' own filings), and a donor's giving pattern never makes them "the lobby" in our data. So for a politician whose pro-Israel money arrived mostly as individual checks rather than through PACs, our figure will be smaller, sometimes by a lot.
Marco Rubio is the clearest example. Track AIPAC lists him at "more than $1 million from AIPAC and the Israel lobby," a figure that traces to OpenSecrets' industry total. Every dollar we can tie to a tracked committee or a roster donor across his four campaigns comes to the figure on his card, itemized on the Receipts page down to the committee and cycle. The gap is individual donors we do not attribute to the lobby, plus a $39 million super PAC that failed the funder test. We would rather publish the smaller number that can be rebuilt row by row than the larger one that cannot. When someone else's figure for a politician is higher than ours, the difference is almost always one of three things: individual donors counted as the lobby, a super PAC that fails Layer 3, or amended filings counted twice.
Every political committee OpenSecrets has classified as pro-Israel since 1990, plus the committees created since (AIPAC PAC, United Democracy Project, DMFI, Pro-Israel America, RJC Victory Fund, J Street's committees, Zioness), plus registry finds. Each ID was resolved by name in the FEC's committee registry and checked against city, treasurer, and years active. J Street's committees are included as of September 4, 2026. A handful of OpenSecrets names could not be matched to an FEC record (Northern Californians for Good Government, Maccabee PAC, and several generic-named PACs under $200K lifetime); they are the only known gaps. Two committees registered in 2025 and 2026 are marked "watch list": they are swept like the rest but have no track record yet. Click any ID to open its FEC page.
The sweep runs after every FEC quarterly deadline (mid-January, April, July, and October) and re-reads the two most recent cycles so late amendments are captured. It does not publish on its own: each run produces a change report that is reviewed by hand before any card moves, and the change log below records what moved and why. The files behind every number are published on this site: the per-politician report, the per-committee, per-cycle detail, the committee list, the funder-test items, the mega-donor gifts, and the review file. The whole dataset is downloadable as CSV, and the lookup widget can be embedded on any site via aipaction.org/embed.
September 25, 2026 — inherited campaign committees. When a candidate takes over another candidate's campaign committees, pro-Israel PAC money those committees received before the handover now counts for the candidate who inherited them, because it paid for that candidate's campaign. One card is affected: Kamala Harris moves from $4,850,378 to $7,792,868, adding the $2,941,490 JStreetPAC and the $1,000 JACPAC gave Biden for President, Biden Victory Fund and the Biden Action Fund before July 21, 2024. Money given to a ticket where the candidate was only the running mate still belongs to the top of the ticket, so the $1,555,926 JStreetPAC bundled to Biden in 2020 after she joined his ticket is not counted.
September 6, 2026 — methodology page corrections. Links to the report, the detail file, the review file, and the mega-donor gifts now point at the copies published on this site (the earlier links went to a private repository). The page now states three rules the pipeline already applied: how "backed" is decided when a group gave to several candidates but advertised for one; that joint fundraising committees raising for one candidate count while two-candidate and leadership-style ones wait for hand attribution; and that the mega-donor roster is built from 24 of the 97 committees, from the 2016 cycle onward. Corrected "two" Pro-Israel America committees to three, noted that Layer 2 starts with the 2008 cycle, and reworded the refresh cadence: the sweep runs on schedule but nothing publishes without hand review. No card changed.
September 5, 2026 — J Street for everyone, and the presidential cards. The rule that J Street's committees count (added September 4) was carried through to the national cards, which were still itemized from the six-PAC August audit. Kamala Harris moved from $547,575 to $4,850,378: JStreetPAC bundled $3,120,178 to her committees after July 21, 2024 (money the same committees took earlier in the cycle, while they were Biden's, is dated out and published), and the sweep found $987,808 in Zioness PAC and $186,292 in DMFI PAC supporting expenditures the audit had missed. Trump moved from $229,488,188 to $230,313,775 (four joint fundraising committees the audit had not searched; a 2025 refund subtracted) and Gingrich from $12,970,321 to $13,078,545 (22 PACs across his House career). Trump and Gingrich now go through the automated sweep like everyone else; Harris is itemized by hand from dated rows because her 2024 committees changed candidate mid-cycle. Three pipeline fixes moved 43 member and candidate cards, all upward except two: campaign committees are now matched by their designation in the cycle the money moved (Sherrod Brown +$705,136, Bonnie Watson Coleman +$21,786); checks filed under a candidate's second FEC ID are credited to the campaign committee that cashed them (Pete Ricketts +$440,008, Susie Lee +$360,192, Pat Ryan +$231,052, Jeff Crank from $0 to $73,498, and 30 smaller moves); and hand-verified extra FEC IDs (an earlier Senate run, an old House ID) now live in their own file and survive every roster rebuild; the automated rebuild would otherwise have dropped them and cost Deborah Ross, Lloyd Doggett and six others their earlier-race money at the next refresh. Darline Graham's card gives back $8,800 that belonged to Lindsey Graham's 2020 committee. Sitting-Congress total: $269,139,212.
September 4, 2026 — Rubio, Vance and Trump revised. The two national cards audited by hand in August were put through the automated four-layer sweep (97 committees, 713 roster donors, every cycle) and will be re-swept quarterly with everyone else. Rubio moved from $318,303 to $904,015 and Vance from $66,730 to $182,085; both receipts itemize every committee and every donor. Trump moved from $126,504,704 to $229,488,188 to add Preserve America PAC's 2020 committee (C00756882, $102,983,484 against Biden, 85.5% Adelson-funded), a separate registration from the 2024 committee of the same name. Two defects in the mega-donor layer were fixed in the pipeline: memo-only redesignation lines were being counted as money, and earmarks whose conduit was named only in the memo text were being counted a second time; sitting members' Layer 4 amounts will be recomputed on the next refresh. Added a note on why our figures run lower than OpenSecrets-derived ones.
September 4, 2026 — full rebuild. Every card was rebuilt from raw FEC Schedule B and Schedule E records across 97 committees (up from 24) and every cycle since 1980. Twelve sitting senators missing from the July roster were added (both senators from Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oregon, and South Carolina). J Street's committees were added to the tracked list. Attack spending is now credited by the rule above. About $47 million of independent-expenditure money that could not be reproduced from the filings was removed from ten cards (largest: Haley Stevens, Glenn Ivey, Adam Schiff, Adriano Espaillat, Maxine Dexter); most of it was double-counted amended filings or unreviewed pass-through PACs, which are now listed in the review file instead. Mega-donor direct gifts (Layer 4) were added to politicians the PACs already fund.
August 2026. Individual audits and corrections published on the Receipts page (Trump, Gingrich, Harris, Rubio, Vance, Cruz, CA-14, NH-01, SC-SEN, TX-SEN).
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