I’d like to announce a new project by Offensive Politics called House Data, launching today. House Data is a large-scale extract of FEC Form 3 Summary of receipts of disbursements (pdf warning) of every US House campaign from mid-2001 onward.

The traditional source for campaign finance summaries is the Candidate Summary File, which is a single set of summary statistics for a campaign for an entire electoral cycle. But a campaign files a new F3 at least quarterly, and before and after every election they participate in. Each F3 provides insight into where a campaign stands, and with access to this intra-cycle data we can better compare campaigns and perform more sophisticated analysis. The House Data file is built from these F3 reports, all 41,050 reports from 2,241 candidates for the US House since 2002. Campaigns often update previously filed reports with amendments, so the file contains only the latest summary provided by a campaign.

The file is compiled automatically using FECHell into a zipped CSV format. New releases will be made within 3 days of a new batch of electronic filings, according to the FEC 2010 Filing Deadline Schedule (pdf warning).

Here is a simple example of a quarterly summary of total receipts and total disbursements made by all house campaigns in 2008:

The House Data Project is live today, with more examples and a data dictionary. The latest version can always be downloaded from http://offensivepolitics.net/data/housedata-latest.zip.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about the house data file please don’t hesitate to contact me.