Beyond a two-party system.
Treat every PAC as a party, and every member belongs to dozens at once. Those overlapping memberships are the metaparties: they decide who gets funded rather than who holds the gavel. Unlike the official two, they do not stop at the aisle. This is $649M in direct PAC money from outside interests to the 537 sitting members of Congress, grouped into the sectors doing the funding. Each dot is a member, pulled toward the money behind them.
Switch to “any dollar counts equally” and the map collapses into a single cluster: nearly every member belongs to nearly every sector, so binary membership cannot tell them apart. Weighting by dollars is what separates them. Click any circle to switch that sector off and watch where members land once its money is out of the picture. Click any dot for that member's full funding breakdown.
Leadership PACs & Member Transfers and Party Committees ($106M) are left off this map: that is the political system funding itself, not an outside interest funding it. Unclassified money is counted in the totals but given no circle, since a residual bucket should not decide where anyone sits.
View the sector data as a table
| Sector | Type | Total | Share | Members funded | PACs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other | other | $143M | 22.0% | 534 | 1,861 |
| Finance, Insurance & Real Estate | business | $109M | 16.8% | 520 | 237 |
| Labor | labor | $72M | 11.1% | 515 | 155 |
| Health | business | $71M | 10.9% | 524 | 232 |
| Energy & Natural Resources | business | $45M | 6.9% | 509 | 201 |
| Agribusiness | business | $43M | 6.6% | 514 | 161 |
| Communications & Electronics | business | $33M | 5.0% | 503 | 96 |
| Defense | business | $27M | 4.2% | 471 | 36 |
| Misc Business | business | $25M | 3.8% | 503 | 79 |
| Transportation | business | $24M | 3.8% | 497 | 59 |
| Ideological & Single-Issue | ideological | $20M | 3.0% | 524 | 85 |
| Construction | business | $17M | 2.6% | 482 | 42 |
| Lawyers & Lobbyists | business | $9M | 1.3% | 500 | 37 |
| AIPACsingle PAC | ideological | $8M | 1.2% | 363 | 1 |
| Realtorssingle PAC | business | $6M | 0.9% | 484 | 1 |
| Leadership PACs & Member Transfers | excluded | $101M | n/a | 519 | 1,207 |
| Party Committees | excluded | $4M | n/a | 304 | 76 |
| Leadership PACs & Member Transfers, Party Committees, totalling $106M, is money Congress moves within itself rather than an outside interest funding it, so it is shown here but excluded from every share on this site. Any single PAC giving more than $5M is listed separately rather than folded into a sector, since at that size it rivals one. Why. | |||||