FEC coverage

How much of historical federal-race finance do we have?

What fraction of historical federal races have candidate_totals (own-committee receipts / disbursements / cash-on-hand) and campaign_spending (Schedule E independent expenditures) from the FEC API? Senate cycles are fully covered; house cycles are partial — the FEC's 1,000 req/hr rate limit means a complete house backfill takes 6-8 hours per cycle.

Federal-races coverage
36%
1,204 of 3,396 federal races have candidate_totals
Per-cycle × per-type
Cycle SenateHousePresidentGovernor
2008 0% · 0/35 n/a
2010 0% · 0/39 n/a
2012 0% · 0/33 0% · 0/442 n/a
2014 0% · 0/36 0% · 0/441 n/a
2016 0% · 0/34 0% · 0/441 n/a
2018 0% · 0/35 47.6% · 210/441 n/a
2020 96.9% · 31/32 28.3% · 125/441
2022 91.2% · 31/34 79.5% · 346/435 n/a
2024 100% · 33/33 98.4% · 428/435 n/a
2025 0% · 0/3
2026 0% · 0/6

Governor + state-leg races are shown for context but they're not filed at FEC (different agency / per-state filings). They have 0% coverage by structural design and don't count toward the federal-coverage summary.

What "coverage" means

A race counts as "covered" once we have its top-2 candidates' candidate_totals (FEC committee summary) and at least one Schedule E independent-expenditure record from any committee. Resume the backfill with:

poliagg scrape spending --cycle 2024 --top-races 0 --max-pages 2 --skip-done

The --skip-done flag filters to races that don't have FEC data yet — saves ~3hrs of redundant FEC API calls on a long house backfill.