DECISION 2018: WHO ARE THE GROUPS BEHIND THE ADS?

Sen. Joe Donnelly was marked as one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the Senate up for re-election in 2018, triggering a flood of PAC and other special interest spending in the Indianapolis market. I researched every outside spending group that advertised on our station's airwaves throughout the primary and general election cycle.

​

The station I was working for at the time has since gone through a website redesign and the original live webpages of my work no longer exist. Below are static PDFs I compiled from screengrabs of what each page looked like.

LANDING PAGE

This landing page summarized all of my work and linked pages with more detailed information.

It also featured an embedded interactive map showing the borders between each U.S. House district, down to which side of a street was in which district. If a user clicked inside the map, it would display a popup identifying which district you had just clicked on and who the incumbent was in that district, and provided a link to the page profiling each candidate on the ballot.

CANDIDATE PROFILES

I created individual pages diving into each of the highest profile races of the election cycle: U.S. Senate and all nine U.S. House seats, plus Marion County (Indianapolis) sheriff and prosecutor.

This page linked below was for Indiana's 6th Congressional District. During the primary, I profiled every candidate who had filed. After the primary, that was narrowed down to each party's nominee.

OUTSIDE SPENDING GROUPS

Too be transparent with our viewers about the ads they saw on our airwaves, I profiled every outside spending group that bought air time with our station, including PACs, Super PACs and 501(c) organizations.

​

This page explained what each organization type is allowed to do under federal law, and then profiled each organization of that type including partisan-leaning, founder and/or largest donor(s), stated purpose and how many ads they had run with us.