FEC Independent Expenditures 101 — Support, Oppose & Schedule E

When a super PAC buys a $4 million ad campaign calling a candidate a "radical" or a "patriot," that transaction shows up in the FEC database as an independent expenditure — what the law calls an IE, and what the filing form calls a Form 24 / Schedule E.

Independent expenditures are distinct from normal contributions in three important ways:

They are uncapped. A super PAC can spend $1 or $100 million on an IE for or against a single candidate.
They must be uncoordinated. The super PAC legally cannot communicate with the candidate's campaign about the content, timing, or targeting of the ad.
They must be disclosed within 48 hours (or 24 hours in the final 20 days before an election). This is why you see huge day-of-election IE filings.

The two flavors: support vs oppose

Every IE line item in the FEC file (fec_independent_expenditure) carries a one-letter code:

S — Support (positive ad for a candidate).
O — Oppose (negative ad against a candidate).

In practice, the oppose bucket is where most of the money goes. Negative advertising is, empirically, more efficient per dollar at moving a targeted voter. That is why the same super PAC will often show up opposing one candidate three times as often as it supports the other.

Reading an IE filing

A typical IE row looks like:

spender_id — the committee doing the spending (super PAC or "non-connected" committee).
cand_id — the candidate the ad is for or against.
support_oppose — S or O.
amount — the dollar value of the buy.
expenditure_date — the date the money was committed, not necessarily the date the ad aired.
payee — usually a media firm, direct mail vendor, or digital ad buyer.

On LobbyVault's committee detail page (e.g. a super PAC's page), you will find:

Supported candidates — ranked by dollars spent on S buys.
Opposed candidates — ranked by dollars spent on O buys.
Spending by cycle — a line chart of how the committee has ramped up across 2020 → 2026.

That gives you a very quick "who is this group, really for?" read without having to parse the raw filings.

The coordination rule — and why it's paper-thin

The coordination rule says a super PAC cannot discuss ad content, strategy, or timing with the campaign it's supporting. In practice:

Public strategy memos are legal. Campaigns routinely post "b-roll" footage of their candidate on public YouTube pages. Super PACs pull that footage and use it in their own ads. Because the footage is "publicly available," no coordination has technically occurred.
Common consultants are legal, as long as a firewall exists. The same media buyer can work for both the campaign and the super PAC, as long as they maintain an internal Chinese wall.
Common vendors are almost universal. The same 3 or 4 ad production shops produce spots for both campaigns and their affiliated super PACs in any given cycle.

This is the open secret of modern campaign finance: coordination is illegal, but parallel behavior funded by the same donors is not.

What to look for on LobbyVault

Two patterns that jump out when you browse IE data on our site:

Single-candidate vehicles. Some super PACs exist to support exactly one candidate. Their "supported candidates" list has length 1, and their spending_by_cycle chart is a spike around that candidate's primary and general.
Ideological hubs. Other PACs spread spending across 30–50 candidates in a cycle. These are the national ideological / party-aligned groups — the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House Majority PAC, and their ilk.

You can tell the difference at a glance from the shape of the top-candidates list on the committee page.

Ongoing limitations in our data

Our fec_independent_expenditure table currently has about 68,000 rows loaded but a subset of those rows have NULL values in critical columns (amount, spender_id, cand_id) due to an in-progress fix to the FEC raw-file parser. We expect to backfill those rows in the next data refresh. In the meantime, totals on the IE summary page are best read as floors, not exact figures.