Commons Populism's political claims are grounded in twelve years of FEC, PDC, IRS 990, and lobbying records — all public, all sourced, all reproducible. This page is the proof. If the data doesn't survive scrutiny, neither does the politics.
In Clark County, Washington — the LD-18 region whose congressional seat is held by Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — the Republican-aligned coalition outspends the Democratic-aligned coalition on independent political expenditures at roughly six-to-one. This isn't a partisan complaint. It's a measurable gap in coalition-coordination capacity, documented across twelve years of PDC filings.
Independent expenditures are the structural-capacity layer of political money — ads, mail, polling, get-out-the-vote, infrastructure that operates across multiple candidates and cycles. The candidate-direct-fundraising gap in this district is much smaller. The IE gap is the actual coalition-organization gap, and that gap is what Commons Populism's strategic premise — D-coalition consolidation — is designed to close.
Per WA PDC dataset 67cp-h962 filtered to Clark County scope across 1,084 records. R-aligned and D-aligned classification documented in the source repository.
The legacy political institutions of Clark County — both parties, the chambers, the unions — were all built for the pre-2016 environment. Every active organization is operating in a universe roughly sixteen times larger than the one it was designed to manage.
Unique Washington voters whose names + ZIPs match Clark County records and who appeared as itemized federal donors. Per FEC bulk individual-contribution files (indiv14.zip through indiv26.zip), cross-matched to the Clark voter registration database.
Two readings of this trend: the opportunity is that existing institutions are systematically underbuilt for the current scale. The risk is that realignment is moving faster than understanding, and the political environment will keep mutating beyond what slow institutional adaptation can track.
The Republican-aligned coalition in Clark County is not a single PAC or a single committee. It's a three-layer apparatus that pools money across trade associations, PACs, and individual family-business donors. Every entity below is documented in public records; the source links are at the bottom.
Each named individual is verifiable via public sources: vestahospitality.com/leadership, romanocapital.com/about, nuttercorp.com, clarkrepublicans.org/pco-list, and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer for the 501(c)(6) entities.
The Democratic-aligned coalition operates differently — fragmented across candidate-by-candidate fundraising, small independent PACs (Vancouver Vitality, Forward Vancouver, Move Clark County Forward, IAFF 452), and labor-union political shops. The structural difference between the two coalitions — networked vs. fragmented — is what produces the 6:1 IE gap.
The national narrative says suburban donors are leaving the Democratic coalition. Clark County's data refutes that — within the matched-donor universe, R-to-D flips slightly outnumber D-to-R flips. The realignment is real, but it isn't one-directional.
The single largest individual flip in the verified data:
| Donor | Location | Direction | Early window | Late window |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Nierenberg (Nierenberg Investment Mgmt) | Camas, WA · P700 | R → D | $77,800 (88% R) | $376,000 (92% D) |
Nierenberg was previously a top Republican donor and national finance co-chair for both of Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns. Per public reporting in The Seattle Times, he and his wife Patricia have given $770,000 to the Welcome PAC since early 2024, supporting the Marie Gluesenkamp Perez model of working-class moderate Democrats winning in R-tilt districts. This is one verified individual whose giving shifted by nearly half a million dollars in late-window volume. The 34 other flippers in the data are smaller-volume but still real.
Per FEC indiv*.zip cycles 2014-2026, cross-matched to Clark voter file. Methodology: per-donor partisan-direction calculation by election cycle using committee-master party tags, classified as "flipped" only when 70%+ shift between early (2014-2018) and late (2020-2026) windows AND ≥$25 giving in both windows.
The 1890s American Populist Party — Mary Elizabeth Lease, Ignatius Donnelly, the agrarian organizers who built cooperatives faster than any movement in American history before or since — articulated a platform that is startlingly relevant to 2026 Clark County. The People's Party lost as a party. Most of their agenda won within twenty years.
Same political tradition. Same target (corporate concentration of shared resources). Different mechanisms because the technology and the dominant industries are different. The 1890s populists never imagined Signal protocol or LoRa mesh networks; we never had to fight a railroad land-grab the way they did. The underlying politics — material, place-anchored, anti-extraction, communitarian — is continuous.
Every claim on this page is grounded in a specific public source. The discipline is that synthesis (narrative about facts) is always distinct from raw data (the source files themselves). If a claim doesn't have a citation, it doesn't belong here.
Every claim about an individual or entity carries a confidence tier:
The data does not yet include:
The partisan-imputation model used in walking maps is a Bayesian logistic regression with 35 features (FEC hard labels, PDC totals, BISG surname-geocoding, age, tenure, voting history, workplace cluster signals, address-density proxies) calibrated by Iterative Proportional Fitting to published precinct totals. Cross-validation accuracy: 62.4%. That number matters: it means even high-confidence predictions carry real uncertainty. The model is good enough to prioritize door-knocks. It is not good enough to claim individual partisan identity. Every voter rendered on a walking map carries the caveat that imputed identity is a hypothesis, not a fact.
The source repository contains every script, every raw-data pull, every aggregation step. Reproducibility is part of the political claim: if the analysis isn't reproducible, the politics isn't grounded. Reproducibility is what distinguishes Commons Populist analysis from political-consultant proprietary "scoring" models that can't be inspected.
The temptation in political-data work is to push the conclusions further than the evidence supports. Commons Populism's discipline is to refuse that move even when it would help our argument.
Specifically, the data does not say:
A serious empirical politics is one that is willing to be wrong publicly and update visibly. The repo's commit history is the record of where the analysis has been corrected — including the embarrassing moment when this project initially fabricated an opposition figure's name before the operator caught it. That kind of correction is the discipline.