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A great way to compare campaign funding for Democrats and Republicans is to go to www.OpenSecrets.org. There, statistics taken from the Federal Elections Commission, are presented in a user-friendly format. This is the place to find out who is giving how much, to whom, without the intrusion of any person's or party's interpretation or opinions. Basically it informs the interested voter which groups or industries think they are likely to get the most positive attention from which candidates, should he or she be elected.

A word of caution: Even if you go to this site only to look up one small bit of information, I suggest that you do so at a time when there aren't a lot of other things you need to get done that same day. Once you start, each fact that you learn is likely to inspire you to look up just one more thing, go to the next bend in the money trail, and then the one after that, and so on.

The statistics presented are for the election cycles from 1990 to the present. Updates are added as the FEC makes them available. Note that the figures for the current campaign will not all be in until after the General Elections. (Some industries and groups are withholding the bulk of their contributions until they know who will make the semifinal cut.)

My own research, in the interest of making myself a more informed voter and for the purpose of writing this article, inspired me to sometimes go off-site for more information. For instance, when I checked to see which party is favored by the tobacco industry I noticed that tobacco was very generous through 2002. After that their contributions to political campaigns seem to fall off sharply. Another graph on the same page told me that contributions through that year included a great deal of "soft" money, which abruptly stopped after that.

A little checking turned up the reason. It was, "The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 otherwise known as the McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform. The purpose of the act was to ban 'soft money' from being contributed to candidates and political parties. It also prohibited the airing of "non-partisan" issue ads funded by soft money in days leading up to elections, among other things. President Bush signed the act into law on March 27, 2002." (Congresspedia: Elections and Government Policy)

The tobacco industry, like many others, no longer could continue the same level of support for the party or campaign most sympathetic to its interests, and what it did contribute

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