About this project

What this is

Who Funds Tennessee makes the state's campaign finance reports searchable — the money behind the race for governor, the legislature, and Tennessee's federal seats. The reports are public records, filed with the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance and, for the federal races, the Federal Election Commission. They're technically available but difficult to use: hard to browse, hard to compare across races, nearly impossible to follow one donor across campaigns. We put them in one place and made them as easy as possible to read.

We publish what candidates and committees were required by law to report. We don't decide what's in the data, the disclosure law does. We don't change the figures a filer reported.

Who Funds Tennessee is an independent, nonpartisan project with no affiliation to any candidate, party, or political organization, and we don't take a position on any race. Democratic and Republican money is shown the same way. The one thing we're for is that this information should be easy to see.

New to campaign finance? Start here explains what the numbers mean, why some donations look duplicated, and what the contribution limits are. This page is about where the data comes from and how far to trust it.

What this site covers

2026 Tennessee election — the race for governor, all 99 state House seats, and the state Senate seats on this cycle's ballot — plus Tennessee's 2026 U.S. Senate seat and all nine U.S. House districts.

Your county and city races are the other door. A mayor, sheriff, county commission, or school board is a local office and isn't here. Shelby County's are at whofundsmemphis.org — the same project, split by jurisdiction because the filings live with different agencies.

A PAC page shows who funds a committee and what it spends on — but only its contributions name who they're for. When a PAC gives to a candidate or another committee, that's a contribution: you can see exactly who got it, and it shows on the recipient's page too. Its other spending — a media buy, a consultant, an ad — Tennessee makes it report only by payee and purpose (the vendor, the service), never by the candidate it's meant to help or hurt. So a PAC page can show a committee spent $10,000 on media, just not for or against whom.

Money spent about a federal candidate, not given to them, is on no one's candidate page. Super PACs and other outside groups can spend without limit to elect or defeat a federal candidate, provided they don't give to or coordinate with the campaign. Because they never give the campaign anything, that spending never enters the candidate's totals, and in a competitive federal race it can dwarf them. Every federal page carries this. A candidate's total here is what their own committee raised and controlled.

Where the information comes from

Every figure is an official total as filed, from one of two sources of record:

• State races — the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance.
• Federal races (U.S. Senate and House) — the Federal Election Commission.

Both publish structured data — spreadsheets and bulk files, not scanned paper — so we load the numbers directly, and every candidate page links back to its source report. (On the federal side, a candidate's headline total is their committee's total reported receipts, so party and joint-fundraising transfers count even where the tables don't itemize them.)

The money, we reproduce faithfully. A dollar figure is the fact; we never change one. If a filing's numbers are wrong, that's the filer's to amend with the Registry — we show the record as filed and update when they do. Our federal figures ride a younger pipeline than the state one, so we lean on the FEC's own committee totals and hold per-donor federal rankings back until an independent check clears them.

The text around it, we clean up. Names arrive however each campaign typed them — "ROBERT BERGHOZIAN" on one filing, "Bob Berghozian" on the next, a city as "NASHVILLE," an employer left "N/A." Raw, that isn't searchable, and one donor scatters across a dozen spellings. So we normalize the formatting, drop the non-answers, and merge records we can prove are one person. Conservatively: two records stay apart rather than merge on a guess, and a joint gift ("Dana & Lee Carter") stays its own donor, never folded into either partner. So a name may read more or less cleanly here than on the filing — a dollar figure never differs from it.

How donors get named

Tennessee names a contributor — address, occupation, employer — once that person gives more than $100 in a reporting period. At or below $100, the filer can report a single unnamed lump.

Since January 2023 that lump is capped at $2,000 per reporting period. Once a candidate's running total of small contributions crosses $2,000, every contribution after it is itemized regardless of size, by order of receipt. So a candidate with many small donors shows both a roughly $2,000 unnamed lump and a run of named sub-$100 contributions — that's the law, not a glitch in our data. Rather than track the cap, many candidates simply itemize every dollar. (Federal filers play by neither rule: they name a donor at $200 for the cycle, with no cap on the unnamed lump.)

We name individuals at $200 or more per candidate, a higher bar than Tennessee's $100, so small donors keep some privacy in a searchable database. Their gifts still count in the candidate's total; only the name is withheld. Organizations, businesses, and PACs are named at any amount. On the federal side our floor and the law's happen to coincide.

The floor applies per candidate. A donor page shows their giving to each candidate they crossed $200 for, and, for organizations, to every candidate. Small gifts to several different candidates aren't shown, even if they sum past $200. A donor page and a candidate page always show the same set of contributions.

Not every named donor gets their own page. A donor who spread money across several recipients, or gave a large amount, gets a profile page. A smaller donor with a single recipient is still listed — the entry links straight to the candidate or PAC they gave to, so nothing is hidden.

How we compute donor statistics

Each candidate page carries a "Who funds this campaign" panel: where the money came from, the average and median gift, a spread of gift sizes, and where donors are. These are aggregates: a share or an average across every donor names no one, so they count everyone who gave, including donors below the $200 display floor. The floor protects identities, not totals.

Two of those figures cover different sets, so they won't always tie out. Sources of funds covers everything the campaign raised, so its parts add up to the headline total. Gift sizes and geography cover itemized contributions only; loans and unitemized lump sums are left out.

• Sources of funds splits the total four ways: the candidate's own money (their contributions plus self- and family loans), individuals (including unitemized small gifts), organizations and PACs, and "other" (in-kind and loans that aren't the candidate's). Unitemized small gifts count as individual money across all races. The split is only person-versus-organization, nothing finer.
• Average and median gift count individuals only; one large PAC check would distort "the average person gave $X." A donor who filed under several spellings counts once.
• Gift-size buckets hold each individual donor's cycle total, so a donor named on the page can still land in a small bucket. They aren't "unnamed donors."
• Geography ranks cities by dollars. A city is named only with at least 5 donors from it, or at least 5% of the located dollars; everyone else folds into "elsewhere." The split appears only when at least 80% of dollars carry a usable state.

Federal races show less. A U.S. Senate or House candidate's panel gives sources and geography but not the average, median, or gift-size spread. The FEC itemizes individual gifts only above about $200 for the cycle, so a per-gift figure built from the itemized rows alone would misread a candidate's small-donor base; the federal panel names that gap instead.

Every published statistic carries a "Why this number?" receipt with its formula and the filings behind it, and each is independently re-derived from the records before it publishes.

If a number looks wrong

Check it against the filing. Every candidate page links to the official source report each figure came from. If our number and the report disagree, the report wins and we want to hear about it.

The filer may be the one who's off. Campaigns make arithmetic errors, and filings are frequently amended for accuracy. We publish the official total as filed and don't audit a campaign's math.

Tell us. Email tips@whofundstn.org with the candidate's name, what looks wrong, and where you saw it. Corrections are the most useful mail we get.

Or go to the source. The Tennessee Registry of Election Finance holds the official state records; the FEC holds the federal ones.

Known limitations

• Totals are as filed. We present the official total each campaign reported. We don't independently audit a campaign's math; an amended filing supersedes an earlier one once the Registry posts it.
• Text cleaning is imperfect. We normalize formatting and merge donors we can prove are the same (above), but source spellings vary from one report to the next and some slip through — which can still affect search and employer-based analysis. 97% of contributions from individuals name an employer or occupation (82% of those over $1,000).
• Two records for one person may not be merged yet. We match names across filings — "Robert Berghozian" and "Bob Berghozian" — with fuzzy matching and review. We leave two records apart rather than merge on a guess, because merging two different people is the worse error. Donor totals and leaderboard rankings carry that uncertainty.
• Committees are ranked on the PACs page, not the donor leaderboard. A PAC both files reports and gives to others, so each committee appears once, on its own page; its contributions to candidates link through to it. A committee filed under a second, not-yet-merged name can still surface as a donor until deduplication links the two.
• Federal donors are lighter than state ones. Federal (FEC) donor names show in a candidate's contribution table but don't yet have their own profile pages, and the donor leaderboard covers state races only.
• Donor totals stop at this site's jurisdiction. A donor's giving on Who Funds Memphis isn't added to the totals here. Where the same donor links across both, a donor page shows an "Also gave" reference — a cross-reference, never a sum.
• The data is as current as the last filing. We pull new and amended filings from the Registry on a regular schedule, and figures update as the official record changes. Money raised this week isn't public yet.

Using this data

The processed data is free to use with attribution. Credit Who Funds Tennessee and link to whofundstn.org. Bulk CSV downloads are on the bulk data page. The underlying campaign finance data is public record; the site design, editorial content, and data processing are original work. © 2026 Who Funds Tennessee.

Your privacy as a reader

The address box never sends your address to us — it goes to the U.S. Census geocoder to find your districts, and nothing is stored.

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, collects no personal information, and doesn't track visitors across sites.

The data portal has an optional box that turns a plain-English question into a database query. When you use it we log the question and the query (to improve the service over time), never a precise IP address, and only the public table structure and your question reach the AI model. The plain SQL box and the CSV downloads use no AI.

Who's behind this

Mavrick Fitzgerald

I'm an urban planner from Memphis. I built Who Funds Tennessee because the state's campaign-finance records are public but clunky to use, and following the money is one of the most basic ways to see who has a say in our politics. I run it independently, on my own time — no campaign, party, or donor funds it or has any say in what it shows.

Get in touch

Found a data error? Have a question about how we load filings? Want to use the data for a story or a research project? tips@whofundstn.org — for a data issue, include the candidate's name, what looks wrong, and where you saw it. Each candidate page links to the official source report if you want to compare first.