Following the Money in the 2026 Midterms – Resources for Local Journalists

The most consequential midterm election stories — who is organizing, how money and messaging are taking shape, and which issues are reshaping voter priorities — are already unfolding, long before the first votes are cast.

Join the National Press Club Journalism Institute and OpenSecrets for a free webinar that will prepare journalists to cover the midterms with financial data top of mind. This interactive session, on Friday, Jan. 16 at noon ET, will focus on OpenSecrets’ campaign finance tools that can support your local and regional political reporting in 2026 and beyond.

OpenSecrets launched in 2021 following a merger between the National Institute on Money in Politics and the Center for Responsive Politics, which expanded users’ access to a vast collection of campaign finance data on state and local races, as well as lobbying data.

During this one-hour, virtual session, participants will learn:

• How to find, download, and incorporate public data into their elections-focused storytelling on deadline;
• How to explore Open Secrets’ “Get Local!” donations tracker and other reliable tools; and
• Strategies to strengthen their midterms coverage in 2026 through accountability journalism.

In the spirit of transparency, this session is also open to interested members of the public.

Registration is free and open here.

About the speaker: Brendan Glavin is the Director of Insights at OpenSecrets. He joined OpenSecrets from the former Campaign Finance Institute (CFI)/National Institute on Money in Politics (NIMP) where he started with CFI in 2001, and continued on after CFI became part of NIMP in 2018. He has worked extensively with federal campaign disclosure data, including congressional and presidential campaign donor data, modeling public financing proposals, and analyzing state and federal independent expenditures. He also worked on creating CFI’s database of state laws. Brendan graduated from Colgate University with degrees in political science and history.