followthemoney.org has an API for State Campaign Funding Data

The Institute on Money in Politics site, followthemoney.org is great for finding campaign funding data for any state in the US. They have real people that collect data for each state and even standardize contributor names, something which I know is a problem from my work with the SF site whosfundingwhom.org.

They also have an API! The first I’ve seen at any level of government for this type of data. I’m already making plans for a California version of opencampaigns.com which mashes up funding data from the followthemoney API. Funding data and news articles for each politician, all in one place!

Finally, they have a cut and paste widget that you can create at their site with a form. You say what candidate you want, and it dumps html code which gives you a ‘live’ feed. Here’s a sample web page where I pasted in the generated code. It makes something that looks like this:

Thanks for this link goes to John Musser and his ProgrammmableWeb site which is the place to go to find interesting APIs and mashups about anything, even politics.