South Carolina campaign finance database is LIVE!
We have finished our first database for donors and expenditures for candidates in the 2024 cycle, including by election stage. Happy Sine Die.
We promised, and we’ve delivered, folks.
Campaign Finance
State Navigate is excited to announce the launch of its next feature for South Carolina Pre-Alpha: candidate campaign finance data. Users can now examine the list of every donor and expenditure made by a candidate’s campaign during the 2024 cycle (01/01/2023 through 12/31/2024) and organize them by name, amount, and date.
You can access our campaign finance pages in various ways: by clicking on a candidate’s “Detailed Finances" on our District Summary pages (which now include candidates’ social media), or the “Finance” button on our header, or from the South Carolina homepage.
Eventually, we plan to expand to non-candidate committees’ donation and expenditure information, and profiling individual donors to see everyone they’ve donated to in the state. It has not yet been determined when we’ll expand our campaign finance database with these features, but we feel that this is a great start!
State Navigate is a nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that aims to serve as a compass for state legislatures nationwide. We need your financial support to make sure that we can pay the staff and expenses required to keep this machine turning.
Help us celebrate this monumental moment in our development by making a tax-deductible donation to State Navigate today! Click the button below to help fund our work.
Finishing Up: Ideology
We’re working on tidying up our next feature launch for South Carolina, W-NOMINATE. This creates two-dimensional ideological plots for each member of each legislative term using every single floor rollcall vote. We’re changing our data collection method to scraping our data from the LIS websites ourselves, styling out the pages, double-checking our coding work, and patching some raw data issues before launching the feature. Below is a quick preview of where we are as we test rollcall data in South Carolina, Virginia, and Utah.
Priority Order Plan Page
As we wrap up our work in South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia over the next several weeks, State Navigate is looking at which states we should launch in next. As detailed in our April Progress Report, we are using a formula to make that determination. To keep the public up to date on what the priority order is, we’ve set up a page on our website showing the launch plan as we go along.
We expect that launching in each state should be much faster going forward after our pilot states are complete in a couple of weeks. All that will be required is importing the data and copying and pasting our pages for each state. Some states may be more difficult than others, especially if they have a lower campaign finance score, which will be the biggest hurdle in launch speed.
Currently, there are 27 states (including our 3 pilot states) that qualify for State Navigate to work to launch in this year. The following states require at least 1 incumbent legislator to follow our Twitter/X account: AL, CA, CO, DE, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KS, MA, MN, NE, NV, NJ, NM, ND, OR, SD, VT, WA. The following states have received 0 survey votes in our survey: DE, ID, KS, SD, VT.
President Nuttycombe’s visit to Columbia
During the last week of the session at the South Carolina General Assembly, President Chaz Nuttycombe drove to Columbia to drop off information cards on our work at each legislator’s office and meet with legislators across the aisle.
Nuttycombe showed several legislators a rundown of our available features and a preview of the campaign finance and ideology/rollcall databases. Of those he spoke with, many were excited and impressed with the level of work State Navigate has put together, and some even were surprised on information about their districts (precinct results, campaign finance, etc.)
Spread the word: State Navigate’s coming to town!
Given the success and reactions to our work in South Carolina, we’ve decided to continue traveling to state capitols across the country while legislatures in session. In late June, we’ll be handing out a new information card letting incumbents in the states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey about our work and how they can move their state up the priority list. Stay tuned for more future trips announced in this newsletter!
Make sure you share this post with friends, colleagues, and family and tell them about our work. We’re doing our part, but your help with outreach is needed!
Warm Regards,
- The State Navigate Team