PALS — PAC Analysis of Legislative Scorecards

PALS traces money from corporate PACs to individual candidates using FEC bulk data, then aligns each candidate with legislative scorecard ratings (e.g. HRC on LGBTQ+ equality, NRA on gun rights) to show how corporate political money lines up with legislative behavior.

The core problem

Corporate PAC money rarely goes only directly to candidates. Much of it passes through intermediaries — party committees, leadership PACs, joint fundraising committees — before reaching a candidate's committee. PALS needs an algorithm that attributes each dollar a candidate receives back to its originating corporate PAC, both directly and indirectly, without double-counting and while handling cycles in the committee network. See openspec/changes/pals-foundation/ for the design.

Planned components

1. Ingestion — download and cache FEC bulk files (committee master, candidate master, committee-to-candidate pas2, committee-to-committee oth).
2. Money-flow attribution — propagate a source PAC's dollars through the committee graph to candidates.
3. Scorecard alignment — join candidates to scorecard scores (HRC, NRA, ...).
4. Website — Quarto site with visualizations, published via GitHub Pages.
5. Pipeline — add companies via config and refresh FEC data regularly.

The pilot corporate PAC is Google.

Tech stack

Python (managed with uv), Jupyter notebooks, Quarto, GitHub Pages. Project planning and change management use OpenSpec (openspec/; start a change with /opsx:propose).

Running the candidate combine step

uv sync
uv run python -m pals.combine      # writes data/processed/*.csv
uv run pytest

Outputs: candidates_combined.csv (one row per FEC candidate with committee totals and HRC score), scorecard_match_report.csv (status of every scorecard row), committee_orphans.csv, match_summary.csv. Fix mismatches by adding rows to data/overrides/scorecard_overrides.csv. The HRC score is for the 118th Congress (2023-24), so challengers and non-incumbents have no score.

Website (Quarto + GitHub Pages)

uv sync --group site
uv run python -m pals.donations    # builds data/processed/pac_*.csv
uv run quarto render site          # or: uv run quarto preview site

The site shows corporate PAC direct contributions by candidate HRC score bin. It is deployed by .github/workflows/publish.yml on every push to main. One-time setup: in the GitHub repo go to Settings > Pages and set Source to GitHub Actions. The site will be at https://gw-ospo.github.io/pals/.

Status

Early setup. Exploratory notebooks in the repo root predate the package layout.