The Influencers by Max Carradine

Every two “year”s we witness an unconscionable amount of money being spent in an election cycle while candidates and elected officials spend an increasing amount of their time courting donations. This project seeks to visualize the financial forces behind the battleground US Senate elections from 2016. Bracketing the six most expensive elections, I identified the top ten outside groups pushing money into the races and then connected those groups’ top ten sources of funds to the network. Patterns and relationships emerge in the biographical layer: a husband and wife give matching $17.5M dollar gifts, super PACs with dystopian “name”s are bankrolled by people with no connection to the state whose voters they seek to influence, dark sources are illuminated, and the methods in which these influential sources acquired and maintained their wealth are revealed.