About Public Union Facts

This website lists public-union political spending for thousands of unions from as early as 1997 to 2020. The data was obtained from the National Institute on Money in Politics and it is complete to the best of our knowledge. The website covers more than 470,000 political contributions from nearly 6,000 labor unions. This data was analyzed by matching local unions with a national or international affiliate (when possible) in order to identify union political spending at both the national and state level. To the best of our ability, political spending by individuals associated with a union has been removed from these data sets.

Only public-sector union data is presented here. Some union locals are affiliated with a national union whose federal spending is not included in this data. This includes the AFL-CIO, United Auto Workers, Communications Workers of America, Laborers’ International Union of North America, International Union of Police Associations, and Office and Professional Employees International Union.

The website combines data from six different data sets:

  • Federal state party spending
  • Federal committee spending
  • Federal party spending
  • State candidate spending
  • State ballot measure spending
  • State party spending

Donations to ballot initiatives were not broken down into Republican or Democratic spending and, therefore, are not reflected in total party spending. Any spending not identified as Republican or Democrat was identified as either non-partisan, third party, or unknown.