Money is everywhere in politics right now. So who's funding the candidates on Florida's ballots?
In just the state level races in Florida, candidates and political committees have raised nearly a billion dollars. And that doesn't include spending on local or federal races.
"The role of money in politics is important because it helps understand who is trying to influence the outcomes," David Meyers explained in an interview. Meyers is with Open Secrets, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that analyzes money in politics.
Most voters — regardless of party — feel that lobbyists and big donors have too much influence in politics. A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 80% of voters felt that "the people who donate a lot of money to their political campaigns" have "too much" influence on the decisions that congressional members make.
"Americans don't agree on much, … whether it's how we fund healthcare or foreign relations, social security, defense spending, anything," Meyers said. "But when it comes to money in politics, there's an unusual unanimity among Americans about changing how things work.
"Study after study shows that Americans want to get 'big money' out of politics. … It's really amazing to see that 80% or so of Americans — and that's Democrats and Republicans — agree that the rules need to change."
Let's find some data!
The good news is, a lot of fundraising data is available to the public in the U.S. via the Federal Elections Commission, the organization that oversees and regulates campaign spending.
That can be found on its site at fec.gov. First, click "Search all campaign finance data."
There are quite a few ways to look at the money in elections, but an easy way is searching for a specific candidate in the "Look up candidate and committee profiles" box.
We'll be looking up contributions to Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody and her challenger, Democratic State Rep. Angie Nixon.
On Ashley Moody's candidate summary page, we can see that funding is automatically combined for both her principal campaign committee, "Ashley for Florida," and another authorized committee, "Moody for FL Senate Republican Nominee Fund 2026," which she established the day after the primary election.
Here, we can see that Moody has raised about $14.5 million through the end of the reporting period.
One of the best ways to see the organizations giving money to her campaign is by clicking the underlined number listed for "Other committee contributions." At time this article is being written, that number is $2,404,500.
If we click the "Amount" column to sort by contribution size, you'll notice that all of the biggest contributions are $5,000, because that's the FEC limit on direct committee contributions to political candidates this election cycle. (That amount gets revised every election cycle.)
Browsing through these pages, we can see that Moody accepted donations from SeaWorld, Home Depot, Lowe's and the National Association of Realtors, which is one of the most prolific political donors in the country.
A level deeper
We'll need to go through a different process to look at the contributions for Angie Nixon, Moody's Democratic opponent in this year's primary, because at time of writing, the FEC hasn't yet processed Nixon's quarterly filing. But we can look at the raw numbers ourselves.
Going through the same steps as above to reach Nixon's candidate summary page, we can navigate to her primary campaign fundraising committee, "Angie for Florida." Click it.
Here's where we can see that Nixon raised $8.1 million through the end of the latest reporting period.
Then, on the left side of the screen, click on "Filings" to access her committee's filing documents. Click on the download icon next to "Pre-General 2026" to download a copy of the raw filing data. You can save it as a PDF to read through her 3,236 pages of filings, but saving it as a CSV file lets us analyze it in a spreadsheet.
Though it's a little less pretty than before, we can scroll down past her individual donors to row 12,588 to see where Nixon's committee contributions start. She got money from Planned Parenthood, from the International Longshoreman's Association Committee on Political Education and from the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
![[Note: I deleted some columns from this spreadsheet for legibility.]](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/0eba700/2147483647/strip/true/crop/905x904+0+0/resize/840x840!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F97%2F39%2Fa7380843463abdeaf235f2d4f054%2Fscreenshot-2026-10-21-143833.png)
What about Super PACs?
This year, billionaires have been dumping tens of millions of dollars into campaigns around the country.
For the most part, those big donations won't show up under the committee contributions, because $5,000 probably isn't enough money to sway races with multimillion-dollar war chests.
Instead, those big contributions are almost always independent spending from Super PACs. Super PACs have no limits on how much they can spend on advertising and voter outreach to support or oppose a specific candidate, as long as they don't coordinate that spending with the candidate or their campaign.
Super PAC spending can be found under independent spending on the FEC. Go to the "Campaign finance data" tab on the ribbon at the top of the page, then click on "Spending."
There, you'll find a link to search through independent expenditures.
On the sidebar, limit your search to the 2025-26 election cycle. Underneath that, you can filter the results by candidates that are the subject of those independent expenditures.
That gives us a list of just the independent spending in Florida's Senate race. And it's a lot! At $19.3 million in outside money, independent groups have spent nearly as much as the candidate committees themselves on influencing this race.
Spending to advantage Moody totaled $27.1 million, compared to about $14.9 million for Nixon.
We can use these same techniques to dig into the PACs that are giving money to these candidates.
New Deal for All Inc., for example, spent more than $3 million to oppose Ashley Moody. Look at its filing paperwork directly (download it as a PDF!). All of that PAC's money came from a pair of donations last week from Stephen Pajcic III, the founder of a Jacksonville injury law firm.
More information
Numbers for state races are on the Florida Division of Elections site through its Campaign Finance Database.
Nonpartisan sites like Open Secrets can also help you look at how specific organizations are giving, including by collating numbers on outside groups that are making independent expenditures to the candidates.
"We want it to be accessible to the public," Meyers said. "We believe that transparency is important, and throwing a lot of data at something that nobody can understand doesn't do anybody any good."
Election Day is Nov. 3, but early voting is already underway.
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