Five questions the public record can answer, and almost never does.
Every filing behind them is already public. They sit in systems that do not talk to each other, under different spellings, which is why they are rarely seen together.
Name the fight and we will tell you what the filings show — with the source on every line.
Three moments it pays for itself.
Who already has the relationship
The members you need, ranked by who funds them, who lobbies them and who they take money from. A coalition gets built out of people already in the room, not people who own stationery.
What the other side is spending
Your opposition’s full footprint in every system it files in, including the ones that never appear in a campaign-finance search, and the mail houses and media buyers behind its independent expenditures.
Whether your own house is clean
Members of a coalition sometimes fund the other side of the issue they have joined you on. Better to know that in the first week than from a reporter in the last one.
One name, wherever California recorded it.
California discloses influence across four systems that were never designed to be read together.
Form 700 records what legislators own, earn and are given. CAL‑ACCESS records campaign contributions and what committees spend. Lobbying filings record who pays which firm to work which bill. Form 803 records money an official directs to a third party without ever touching it.
Each one is public. None of them will tell you that the company that donated to a member is also the client of the firm lobbying their committee.
Resolving the names does. Every name string across every system maps to one canonical actor, so a donor, a lobbying client, a Form 700 gift source and a behested payor collapse into a single body with a single footprint. That is what makes the connections askable: the donors two members share, the firms that represent a member’s donors, an interest’s total presence in every system it files in.
Every row keeps its source key, so any figure traces back to the filing it came from.
One company. Six filing systems. One footprint.
Every figure below is public. They sit in different systems under different spellings, which is why they are rarely seen together. The join is what makes the proportion visible: the direct contributions everyone checks are about one per cent of what moved through ballot measures.
supporting and opposing
97 legislators
13 members
Uber Technologies, 2016–2026. The $1.48M it gave 97 legislators directly is about 1% of what it moved through ballot measures. Both are public. They sit in different systems under different spellings, which is why they are rarely seen together. Never summed: the dollars overlap by design, so a total would invent a number that isn’t real.
Five things the join makes possible.
In the order clients tend to recognise themselves in them.
Everything one interest does here
Take a single funder — a carrier, a tech company, a union — and show its entire presence in one place: direct contributions, lobbying spend and the firms it retains, independent expenditures, behested payments, gifts and travel, ballot‑measure money.
Nobody can assemble this from the state’s own portals, because each portal only knows its own slice. The finding is usually a proportion rather than a total, and the one everyone checks is routinely the smallest — the example above shows a company’s direct contributions to legislators running at about one per cent of what the same company moved through ballot measures.
The room a bill walks into
Before a hearing, profile the committee: who funds each member, which of those donors are clients of the firms working the bill, who has hosted them, and where each member sits relative to the caucus.
It answers who is already in the room, rather than who is on the roster.
Which Democrat is which
In a supermajority state the party label tells you almost nothing. Members can be placed by caucus position, derived from their actual donor mix — measured from the filings rather than asserted — and they separate into groups you can recognise.
That is the difference between a whip count and a guess.
Who paid for the campaign against you
Independent‑expenditure and ballot‑measure committees are the blind spot in most analyses: their spending is visible and their funding is not. Loading the receiving side closes the loop, so a committee with a pleasant name resolves into the handful of interests that wrote the checks — and into whatever else those interests have before the Legislature.
Independent expenditures are, by law, made independently of the candidate they support or oppose. Knowing who funded one says nothing about coordination, and we do not suggest otherwise.
The consultants and the vendors
Every consultant, mail house, pollster and fundraiser working in California, with who pays them, how much, which side they generally work and what they actually produce.
Useful for competitive intelligence, for vetting a partner or a hire, and for reading a new campaign’s shape from its vendor list before it has announced anything.
Conflict screening. A member’s disclosed financial interests read against the matters in front of them — surfaced as potential and for review, never as an accusation. It is the use we are most careful with, and the one clients ask for last and value most.
We organize what California has already disclosed.
Form 700 statements of economic interest, CAL‑ACCESS campaign finance, lobbying registrations and reports, Form 803 behested payments, Form 461 major‑donor filings.
We do not allege anything. Every line says where it came from, so you can check it, and so can the person you hand it to.
- Non‑partisan by design. The research has no side, and neither do we.
- Channels are reported separately and never summed — the same dollars are disclosed by more than one filer, so a grand total would invent a number that is not real.
- Independent expenditures are, by law, made independently of the candidate they support or oppose.
- Financial interests are point‑in‑time; gifts and travel are flows. They are counted differently because they are different things.
- Findings are framed for review, never as accusations.