Read this first
This page exists before the pages it governs. That is deliberate and it is the same order we used federally: publish the rules, dated, then apply them. A rule written after the result is not a rule, it is an explanation.
No senator is scored here. There is no rating, no grade, and no verdict. There are counted dollars from the state's own filings, sorted into categories the state itself names, with every gap stated.
Nebraska is not a copy of the federal system and this page is not a copy of the federal page. Different regulator, different filings, different categories, different thresholds, and one subject that does not exist at all. Where they differ, this page says so.
Where the numbers come from
| What | Source |
|---|---|
| Money | Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission — the "Contributions and Loans" bulk export |
| File layout | NADC's own published layout key (PDF) — cited, not guessed |
| Who the 49 are | The Nebraska Legislature's own senator list |
| Votes | The Unicameral's own journal — not built yet. See "What isn't built" below. |
Everything above is free and public. No paid API is used anywhere on this site, and none will be.
Before any total is computed, the loader compares the export's columns against NADC's published layout key and prints any it does not recognise. On 2026-09-09 all 24 columns matched exactly. If NADC changes the export, that check says so instead of silently mis-reading a column.
The four differences from the federal rules
These are the things a reader who knows the federal page needs to know before reading a Nebraska number.
1. Five subjects, not six
The federal page declares six subjects. Nebraska has five, because Subject 6 — the Constitutional Authority Statement — does not exist at state level. It is a U.S. House rule. There is no Nebraska equivalent, so there is no Nebraska measurement.
We say that rather than leaving a blank, because a blank looks like something we failed to collect.
2. The itemization line is $250, not $200
Nebraska itemizes contributions over $250. The federal line is $200. Neither is a flaw; both are the law, and naming it is the honest move.
3. Nebraska has a donor category the federal system does not
"Business (For-Profit and Non-Profit entities)" — entities giving directly. There is no clean federal equivalent, and it is not folded into "individual" to make the shape match.
It is also the single largest category in the data, ahead of Individual. Merging it to fit a federal template would have hidden the biggest source of money in Nebraska politics inside a familiar-looking number.
4. Money and votes are two sources and are never averaged
Money is NADC. Votes are the Unicameral's own journal. They are never combined into one number, the same two-layer rule the federal page uses.
The categories, and where each one came from
None of these were invented. Every category below is a value NADC itself puts in the "Contributor or Transaction Source Type" column. The tool prints every distinct value it finds; the mapping is written from real data.
| NADC source type | Our bucket |
|---|---|
| Individual | individual |
| Business (For-Profit and Non-Profit entities) | business |
| PAC-Separate Segregated Political Fund | state_pac |
| PAC-Independent | independent_pac |
| Federal PAC | federal_pac |
| Ballot Question Committee | ballot_question_cmte |
| Political Party Committee | party |
| Candidate Committee · Self (Candidate) | candidate_self |
Why four kinds of PAC instead of one
A separate segregated fund, an independent PAC, a federal PAC giving into a state race, and a ballot-question committee giving to a candidate are four different facts. Collapsing them into "PAC" would be tidier and would destroy the distinction.
The first version of this mapping was confirmed in August against two senators' filings. Neither had independent-PAC money, so PAC-Independent never appeared and the map looked finished.
Run against all 48, it turned up for 44 of them — $773,027 with no category, including 54.7% of one senator's entire receipts.
The tool refused to file that money under an existing label and stopped. Anything NADC reports that we have not explicitly mapped is counted as unmapped, and the tool will not write a publishable file while that number is above zero. A new category can never disappear into an old bucket.
What we count, and what we leave out
| Item | Treatment | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Monetary contributions | counted | the core of "who funded them" |
| In-kind contributions | counted | a donated service is support, and NADC reports it as a contribution |
| Loans | excluded from totals, reported separately | a loan is not income. It is money that may have to be paid back. |
| Negative-amount rows | summed as-is, which nets them | they are NADC's own corrections — see below |
The negative rows, and why they are not refunds
NADC's export contains negative amounts. It would be easy to read those as refunds. They are not. They are the Commission's own correction mechanism: when a filing is amended or deleted, an offsetting entry appears.
First checked in August on 25 rows from two senators. Re-checked 2026-09-09 across all 48: 766 negative rows totalling −$1,088,909.88.
Every single one carries a description beginning "Offset due to update of filed item" or "Offset due to delete of filed item." Zero blank descriptions. Zero exceptions. Netting them is correct.
The one number we compute, and the cut lines
One number is derived: PAC share — PAC dollars as a percentage of total receipts.
PAC share = (state_pac + independent_pac + federal_pac) ÷ total receipts
All three kinds of PAC count toward it. Leaving independent PACs out would understate the share for 44 of 48 senators, which defeats the purpose of computing a share at all.
| PAC share | Label |
|---|---|
| under 40% | no label |
| 40% – 59.9% | #PAC_FUNDED |
| 60% and above | #HIGH_PAC_SHARE |
A label is a description of a funding mix. It is not an accusation, and PAC money is legal and disclosed.
The label is a pure function of the number. Party is not an input. Nebraska's Legislature is officially nonpartisan — party appears nowhere in this calculation, and where a party is recorded at all it is because a source reported it, never because we use it.
What this data cannot tell you
The export contains 6,362 rows under $250 — real sub-threshold money. But it also contains aggregate rows. One senator's filing includes a single line of $8,474.00 described "TOTAL OF ALL CONTRIBUTIONS UNDER $250" — that one row is hundreds of people.
So dollar totals are sound and donor counts are not. No page on this site will publish a number of donors drawn from this data, and if you build on it, neither should yours.
It cannot tell you why anyone gave, or what anyone expected in return. It records that money moved, from whom, on what date.
It cannot tell you about money that never had to be reported. Every disclosure regime has a floor, and what is under the floor is not in the file.
It cannot tell you how anyone voted. That is a different source and it is not built yet.
Coverage — 48 of 49, and the 49th is an answer
Forty-eight of Nebraska's forty-nine senators have a campaign committee on file with NADC. One does not, and that is a fact rather than a gap in our work.
He has no campaign finance record because he has never run for the seat. He was appointed to District 41 in 2023 after Sen. Tom Briese resigned to become state treasurer, did not run to retain it in 2024, and was appointed again on 2026-01-14 after Sen. Dan McKeon resigned. He holds the seat until a special election in November 2026.
His page will say that. It will never show $0, because zero is a claim about fundraising and "no committee" is a different fact entirely.
Name matching is published too. NADC spells people the way their committee registered — nicknames, middle names, suffixes. Where a match was not exact, a human decided and the reason is recorded with a date in data/ne_roster_overrides.json. Two names on the roster share a surname with another sitting senator; both were resolved by hand rather than by a rule, because a wrong match would put one senator's money on another's record.
What isn't built yet
- Votes. Attendance and roll calls for the 49 need the Unicameral's own journal. Not started.
- Bills introduced and enacted. Available from the Legislature's site. Not collected.
- Filing timeliness. NADC publishes deadlines and filing dates; late is checkable. Not measured.
- Statements of Financial Interest (Form C-1). A real state analogue to federal disclosure. Not collected.
This list originally carried a fifth item: the data file had no record of which years each total covered. Fixed 2026-09-09. Every entry now carries years_with_receipts, its first and last receipt date, and total_is_per_cycle: false.
And fixing it surfaced something larger. Senators have between two and six years of filings depending on tenure — one senator's $606,558 spans six years while another's $186,056 spans two. Ranking those as "who raised more" would measure time served, not fundraising. Every entry now carries a coverage_warning saying so, and any page built on this data must show the year span next to the number.
Progress on the four items above is tracked in ne-state-build-tracker.md, with what each one actually costs and what is blocking it.
Changelog
| Version | Date | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| NE-1.0 | 2026-09-09 | First publication. Categories confirmed against all 48 filing senators. independent_pac and ballot_question_cmte added as their own buckets after being found unmapped for 44 senators; both PAC types included in PAC share. Negative-row treatment re-verified at 766 rows. Aggregate-row limitation documented. |
| — | 2026-08-05 | Category mapping first drafted from two senators' filings. Superseded — it was incomplete, and this page says how. |
Corrections get a row here with a date. We do not quietly edit a rule and leave the old pages standing.