Capitol Trail is a civic transparency platform that maps the financial relationships between political donors and U.S. Congress members. We analyze campaign finance data, voting records, and industry funding patterns to surface potential incentive alignments — without drawing causal conclusions.
Money flows through politics in ways that are difficult to track and harder to contextualize. Capitol Trail makes that data accessible — structured, searchable, and put in plain language — so citizens, journalists, and researchers can ask better questions.
We don't allege corruption. We present data. The goal is to make it easier to see which industries fund which legislators, how those legislators vote on related bills, and where financial relationships cluster.
All data originates from federal government sources and is used under public domain / open government data principles.
Industry alignment scores reflect the proportion of a politician's campaign donations that come from a given industry sector (e.g., Oil & Gas, Pharmaceuticals, Finance). A high alignment score means a significant share of documented contributions trace to that industry.
Scores are computed from FEC contribution records. PAC and committee names, and individual donors' employers, are matched to industry sectors (an OpenSecrets-style taxonomy) using keyword rules and AI classification — Capitol Trail does its own matching rather than importing OpenSecrets' figures. Aggregators like ActBlue and WinRed are excluded from industry scoring because they bundle donations from many sources. A score is the share of a member's classified contributions that trace to that industry; the confidence level tells you how much of their total money was classifiable in the first place.
Low confidence scores occur when donation data is sparse (e.g., some senators with limited individual contribution records). Confidence is noted where relevant.
The party-line vote percentage shown on politician profiles measures how often a member voted with their party's majority position on contested bills. For each bill where the politician cast a YEA or NAY vote, we compute the majority position of their party and check whether the politician's vote matched. Bills with no clear party majority (tie) are excluded.
A high party-line score indicates consistent alignment with party positions, not necessarily ideological rigidity — party majorities themselves vary by bill.
TrailAI is Capitol Trail's AI analysis layer. It generates politician profile summaries, bill analyses, and investigative insight narratives using structured donation and voting data as input. All TrailAI output is evidence-based, neutral in tone, and regenerated periodically as new data is ingested.
TrailAI is built on Anthropic — specifically the Claude model family. Anthropic is an AI safety company focused on building reliable, interpretable AI systems.
Anywhere you see the TrailAI label, the content was generated by AI and should be treated as an analytical starting point, not a definitive characterization. The underlying data is always sourced from federal government records.
Campaign finance data reflects disclosed contributions only. Dark money, in-kind contributions, and some bundled donations are not captured. FEC records have known data quality issues (misspellings, inconsistent employer fields).
Donation-to-vote correlations are observational. The presence of industry funding does not prove that funding influenced a vote. Many factors shape legislative decisions.
Coverage is limited to current Congress members (537 tracked). Former members, candidates, and non-congressional officials are not included.
Capitol Trail is a free civic-transparency platform that maps the financial relationships shaping the U.S. Congress. It brings together campaign finance, lobbying, voting records, and congressional stock trades for every sitting member, then puts the patterns in plain language so anyone can explore who funds whom and how those members vote.
Every figure traces back to an official public record: campaign contributions from Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings, voting records from the House and Senate roll-call rolls, bill data from Congress.gov, lobbying activity from Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, and stock trades from members' own congressional financial disclosures. We do our own matching and analysis rather than reselling another aggregator's numbers.
No. Capitol Trail never alleges corruption, bribery, or quid pro quo. We present documented financial relationships and let you draw your own conclusions. Where money and policy line up, we describe it as donor or industry 'alignment' — a correlation, not proof that any contribution caused any vote.
An industry alignment score is the share of a member's classified campaign contributions that trace to a given industry, such as Oil & Gas, Pharmaceuticals, or Finance. A high score means a large portion of their documented, classifiable money came from that sector. A separate confidence level tells you how much of their total funding we were able to classify in the first place.
We self-source it from members' official financial disclosures. A member's most recent annual disclosure provides a holdings baseline, and we roll it forward using their Periodic Transaction Reports — the trade-by-trade filings required under the STOCK Act — to estimate a current portfolio. Every individual trade is also listed in a sortable ledger with the dates it was made and reported.
No, and by law they can't be. The STOCK Act only requires members to disclose values in broad ranges, such as '$1,001–$15,000,' never exact share counts, prices, or profit and loss. Capitol Trail shows the disclosed ranges along with clearly-labeled midpoint estimates — never a false-precision dollar figure.
It measures how often a member voted with the majority of their own party on contested bills. For each bill where they cast a Yea or Nay, we check whether their vote matched their party's majority position. A high percentage indicates consistent alignment with party positions — not necessarily ideology, since the party's own majority shifts from bill to bill.
TrailAI is Capitol Trail's AI analysis layer, built on Anthropic's Claude models. It writes the plain-language profile summaries, bill analyses, and insights using the underlying donation and voting data as input. Anywhere you see the TrailAI label, the text was AI-generated and should be treated as an analytical starting point — the data behind it always comes from federal records.
Capitol Trail refreshes nightly from its government sources, so new filings, votes, and trades typically appear within about a day of being published. Keep in mind the disclosures themselves carry built-in lag: campaign finance is filed on FEC schedules, and stock trades can be reported up to 45 days after the trade.
Yes. Capitol Trail is free and open to everyone — citizens, journalists, students, and researchers alike.
No. Capitol Trail is an independent project and is not affiliated with any political party, campaign, candidate, or government agency. The same methodology is applied to every member, regardless of party.
Capitol Trail does its own classification and de-duplication directly from the raw FEC and disclosure filings rather than importing another site's figures, so totals can differ slightly — for example in how refunds, bundled donations, or a donor's multiple committees are handled. Our methodology is documented on this page, and we welcome corrections.
All current sitting members of the U.S. House and Senate are tracked. Former members, challengers, candidates, and non-congressional officials are not included.
We welcome corrections. Use the contact page to flag any figure that looks off, and include the member or specific filing in question so we can trace it back to the original source.
Capitol Trail is an independent civic project. Data corrections, methodology questions, and partnership inquiries are welcome.