25 years of political donations with MapD
By Matt Irwin
Spending by US presidential campaigns is rising steadily. In 2012, the Obama and Romney campaigns spent more than $1 billion apiece. Democratic and Republican candidates have already spent a total of $551 million in the 2016 presidential primaries.
This level of spending makes it harder — and more important than ever — to follow the money.
MapD, a GPU-optimized database and visualization platform, lets you explore 28,143,638 individual donations from presidential and Congressional stretching back to 1990 on a Mapbox vector map. The data comes from the Federal Election Commision by way of the Sunlight Foundation. You can search by year, race, party, candidate, or location and view individual donors, amounts, and dates.
MapD holds data in memory, so filtering and queries are crazy fast. Check out the live demo.
Using Mapbox to improve political transparency this election season? Show us what you’re building @Mapbox.
