(Photo illustration by John Partipilo)
This database was first published in July 24, 2023. It has since been updated multiple times. The last update came on Feb. 24, 2025.
Every year millions of dollars flow to Nashville, flooding the halls of Tennessee’s state capitol as a small number of deep-pocketed groups attempt to influence lawmakers.
The money comes in many streams through different legal channels, all aiming to influence regulations, push for tax breaks and secure government contracts, often to further private interests instead of the public. The Tennessee Lookout, relying on publicly filed lobbying and campaign finance reports, created a tool to search Tennessee’s top political spenders and recipients.
This page allows users to discover who’s spending the most cash to influence lawmakers and different ways groups spend money to gain influence.
Through the search bars below:
- Explore every person and organization that has given a specific state politician at least $1,000
- Look at politicians and organizations spending money independently to elect their chosen candidates
- Search all the organizations that have spent money lobbying lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Nashville
- Tennessee’s million-dollar club
- Politics Working & the Economy Tennessee’s largest companies secure sales tax exemptions for everything from jet fuel to water
- Connecting the dots between Tennessee’s home builders and bill to deregulate construction on wetlands
- The $27.1 million clash between education reform and public school advocates
- What happens when a cash-poor billionaire wants a new sports stadium? Lobbying.
- AT&T, the broadband conundrum and a $204 million tax exemption
- Timely donations to Gov. Lee spark rise of Tennessee charter operator with dubious ties
Have a tip on how money is influencing decisions at the Tennessee Capitol? Send an email to afriedman@tennesseelookout.com. For encrypting messaging, text 615-249-8509 on Signal, or call the same number.
Methodology:
The underlying data for this story comes from a lobbying report database and a campaign finance report database maintained by the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance. To create the top donor list, the Lookout combined spending from three categories — lobbying, campaign donations and independent expenditures.
The Bureau provides lobbying expenditures in ranges. For example, when the report said $10,000 to $25,000, the Lookout used $17,500 for the amount spent. When the report said less than $10,000, $1,000 was used.
For campaign donations, the Lookout has tracked contributions to every candidate and political action committee connected to a candidate since 2009.
Contributions to candidates and their PACs were combined when reporting how much they raised. We eliminated all donations from elected officials to their party PACs (Tennessee Legislative Campaign Committee and Tennessee Tomorrow PAC) because often those donations were reimbursements for campaign expenses.
Independent expenditures were also reported as part of the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance campaign database under expenditures. We used a similar method for donations to compile a complete spending list.
Since 2010, several companies, associations, and families have used multiple political action committees, changed their company names, or purchased other companies with political activity in Tennessee. The Lookout combined all the names it could find for a single company, family, or association. All of a past company’s campaign finance and lobbying data were combined under the new company’s name for mergers.
The data behind this story is also available to download
The completely unedited campaign finance database broken into folders, which contains over 2 million rows of data includes donations to lawmakers, lawmakers PAC and donations to any PAC that has operated in Tennessee (from Jan. 16, 2010, to Jan. 15, 2025).
An edited form of campaign finance data, this data mirrors the data in the “Search the campaign funders of Tennessee’s state politicians” flourish chart.
The Lookout’s lobbying expenditures data (from Jan. 1, 2010, to June 30, 2024) with merged name is available for download.
Data on independent expenditures (from Jan. 16. 2010 to Jan. 15, 2025). (58.1 MB)
Click here for the link to the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance campaign contribution and expenses website.
Click here for the link to the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance lobbying website.