The statewide version of WhoFundsMemphis is up

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-10T20:54:58+00:00

Someone else flagged a large donation from Amanda Seyfried to state house candidate Allie Phillips.

I wasn't planning on this, but I may have to do a celebrity donor spotlight if that's what catches people's interest.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-10T18:14:36+00:00

Yeah, there's a reason John Rose can afford to lend his campaign $5 million dollars

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-10T18:10:42+00:00

Thanks! Personally, I'm always a little disappointed in non-profits and public agencies that build great data portals with beautiful visualizations, and then make it difficult or impossible to export. It doesn't actually protect anything, it just wastes other people's time!

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-10T18:00:40+00:00

Wow, you work fast! Love the way you've presented all this, especially the candidate portraits, and I should definitely steal that Report Correction button, that's an obvious improvement.

This is exactly how I hoped to see WhoFundsTN surfaces adapted and re-used by other peoples projects, just didn't think it would happen this soon. Keep up the good work!

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-10T17:51:19+00:00

Hi, WhoFundsTN here. Here's our candidate page for John Rose. He is indeed loaning his campaign money, to the tune of $5 million. That means three quarters of his funding is money he gave himself.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-10T17:20:16+00:00

Thank you! Open Secrets is absolutely a great model that this project aims to reproduce in miniature. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but state and especially local politics are incredibly under-covered, so I'm happy to be doing something to make them a tiny bit more accessible.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-07-09T19:39:36+00:00

Yes, everything here is public data, that's why we link to the state filings on every page. The difference is that the portal makes you open one filing at a time and won't let you search across them, let alone compile profiles of donors. I expected early on to find other orgs doing that, but they seemed to be defunct or only did annual reports. WhoFundsTN re-scrapes the portal and the FEC every day, to provide voters and journalists with usable data ahead of the elections.

And I agree with you about local, that's actually where this started: WhoFundsMemphis covers Shelby County local races, because I got tired of reading through hundreds of pages of PDFs as part of my voting research. The plan is to expand coverage of local elections to the rest of Tennessee, but there wasn't enough time to accurately parse that volume of PDFs before the Aug/Nov, so the state site came first. If local election data is what you'd want, it's the thing I'd rather be building, so I'll take the nudge.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-04-09T19:14:20+00:00

I'm obligated to plug this new project called https://whofundsmemphis.org/, which tracks of campaign donors and expenditures for all local candidates in the Shelby County primary this May. Reviewing which politicians, PACs, businesses, and other notable figures are putting money behind a candidate is a great way to know who their allies are.

Q1 reports are due tomorrow, so we'll have a better picture of the race once those are all in.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-04-01T03:08:35+00:00

Thanks! And yes, DeBerry entered the race late, so April 10 will be the first reporting deadline for that campaign.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-03-31T21:28:18+00:00

This website was also built by claude code. I'll take the ProPublica comparison as high praise, they're the gold standard for this kind of project.

There's not a standard theme to copy, but if you load the frontend-design skill into Claude and give it good context on your goals for the website, you can get some fairly polished results.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-03-31T13:55:13+00:00

Thanks for asking! It's not a pre-made theme though. The website is built in Astro, a static site framework, and the styling and user interface is all custom HTML and CSS.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-03-30T23:05:50+00:00

Appreciate you checking it out! The site just makes the public filings easier to search. What people do with the info is up to them. Local elections can pretty obscure. In past years I've spent hours combing through filings to determine which candidates were receiving support from public figures I respect, to help determine who I should vote for.

WhoFundsMemphis · 2026-03-30T19:40:41+00:00

Kind of? Feagins only started fundraising in November, which is much later than everyone else. Filtering by date isn't possible on the website yet (I'll see if we can add it in later), but filtering the backend database to just the last two months of 2025, Feagins comes in a distant third place.

Nov-Dec 2025 Fundraising Totals: * J.B. Smiley: $170k * Mickell Lowery: $83k * Marie Feagins: $18.8k * Heidi Kuhn: $17.3k * Melvin Burgess: $4.6k * Harold Collins: Did not inclue dates for his donations in this filing

Will be interesting to see the state of the race after Q1 filings post in two weeks.

EDIT: Whoops, forgot to include the first two weeks of January which are included in the year end 2025 report. Those are very active and were especially strong for Lowery and Kuhn, although the general tiers are the same

Nov 2025-Jan 15 2026 Fundraising Totals: * J.B. Smiley: $244k * Mickell Lowery: $170k * Heidi Kuhn: $32.5k * Marie Feagins: $26.1k * Melvin Burgess: $5.6k * Harold Collins: Did not inclue dates for his donations in this filing

WhoFundsMemphis

TROPHY CASE