What it donors give in federal races

High-frequency receipts on two letters

$5,736,483 is the occupation-level dollar total. 50,708 is the itemization count. 1,389 is the donor-record count. Dividing dollars by lines yields about $113 per contribution. Dividing by donors yields about $4,130 per donor record. The repeat rate is about 37 itemizations per donor record. Fifty thousand-plus lines from 1,389 donor records is a high-frequency pattern: many receipts per person and a modest mean dollars per line.

Those means are arithmetic, not medians. The packet has no gift-size distribution, no party split, and no cycle series. A few large lines can lift $113 while most receipts stay smaller—or the reverse. This guide cites only the three harvested facts and the trivial ratios computed from them.

A two-letter occupation is a coarse bucket. Help-desk staff, systems administrators, and people who work in an IT department can all land here—or on longer strings that never join this total.

Why the IT label is noisy

Some donors write IT; others write INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY or IT PROFESSIONAL. FEC bulk data keeps each spelling. LobbyVault does not merge them.

FEC Form 3 (candidate committees) and Form 3X (PACs and party committees) collect occupation as free text on itemized Schedule A. FEC.gov publishes what committees reported. There is no drop-down of job titles and no license check. LobbyVault groups rows whose occupation field equals IT after indexing. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, IT MANAGER, and SOFTWARE ENGINEER remain other occupation pages unless the extract normalized them to IT.

What 1,389 donor records can and cannot show

1,389 donor records used IT on at least one matching itemization. 1,389 donor records used IT on at least one matching itemization. That is not a headcount of information-technology workers. The two letters are a coarse bucket.

A person who listed IT on some gifts and a neighboring title on others will appear in both occupation totals for the respective lines. Occupation is stored per transaction, not as a lifetime identity field. Address variants can also split one human into more than one donor record.

Occupation versus tech industry pages

Industry pages on LobbyVault group employer-side categories. An IT worker at a bank and one at a hospital share this occupation string if they typed IT. Do not read the dollars as a tech-industry total. Adding $5,736,483 to an industry total double-counts overlapping itemizations. Use one filter at a time unless you are tracing a single row.

Open the IT occupation page for the indexed line list. Use the occupations index to place this string next to neighboring labels. Independent expenditures are not contributions and are not inside $5,736,483.

How to cite the IT key

A usable public-record citation names the exact string: IT itemizations in FEC bulk data indexed on LobbyVault sum to $5,736,483 on 50,708 contributions from 1,389 donor records. Add that the figure is itemized occupation money. Unitemized receipts never carry an occupation code, so they never enter the total.

Source: FEC Form 3/3X schedules. The facts do not encode party. Recipient committees are a different join. Two letters on Schedule A are not a cleaned information-technology census.

Treating IT as an abbreviation in FEC files

IT in this extract is $5,736,483 on 50,708 itemizations from 1,389 donor records, or $5.7 million in compact millions. Those dollars are itemized activity on FEC Form 3 and Form 3X schedules indexed on LobbyVault from FEC.gov bulk data. Unitemized receipts never carry an occupation code, so they never enter the total. Refunds and memo entries follow FEC presentation in the underlying schedules; this guide does not invent a fourth occupation-level fact. IT is an abbreviation in free text, not a Standard Occupational Classification code. The occupation field is donor-supplied free text, not a NAICS industry code and not a verified roster.

Arithmetic means on this key are about $113 per contribution and about $4,130 per donor record, with roughly 37 itemizations per donor record. Means are not medians. The packet has no gift-size distribution and no party split. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, IT MANAGER, and SOFTWARE ENGINEER remain other occupation pages unless the extract normalized them to IT. Combining those keys without naming each source total changes the unit from one FEC string to a homemade cluster.

Industry pages group employer-side categories and should not be added to $5,736,483. A public-record citation that stays inside the packet is: occupation equals IT, dollars equal $5,736,483, contributions equal 50,708, donors equal 1,389. Candidate and committee pages hold the recipient side. LobbyVault does not infer motive from the occupation column.

Researchers who need cycle cuts, employer text, or recipient lists should leave this guide and open the live occupation hub. This file restates harvested packet facts only. Compact millions ($5.7 million) are the same headline amount as $5,736,483, rounded to one decimal place. Keep the contribution count and the donor-record count in any sentence that quotes the dollars, so readers can see the shape of IT in this extract. Exact-string matching is the method. Anything else is a different query.

Questions

How much have it donors given in FEC records?

Itemizations that list IT sum to $5,736,483 across 50,708 contributions and 1,389 donor records in the LobbyVault index of FEC bulk data. The total is an exact-string occupation filter. Occupation is self-reported free text on FEC Form 3 and Form 3X schedules. Unitemized receipts never enter this occupation total.

Is software engineer included in the IT total?

No. SOFTWARE ENGINEER is a different occupation key. This page covers IT only: $5,736,483, 50,708 contributions, and 1,389 donors. Combining them would invent a combined tech total the packet does not contain. The occupation field is donor-typed on Form 3 and Form 3X. LobbyVault indexes exact strings from FEC.gov bulk data. Unitemized gifts never carry an occupation code.

Why are there 50,708 contributions?

That is the itemized line count for this exact string. Repeat gifts from the same 1,389 donor records add rows. About 37 lines per record and about $113 per contribution are means on $5,736,483. Cite the three packet facts with the exact occupation string. Source: FEC.gov Form 3/3X itemizations indexed on LobbyVault. Unitemized receipts are outside this total.

Does this total represent the tech industry?

No. It is one two-letter occupation string. Tech employees use many other titles. Industry pages group employer-side data. The occupation total remains $5,736,483. Confirm surprising amounts on the committee report at FEC.gov. Occupation matching is exact-string only. Unitemized receipts never enter this occupation total.