Tacoma Campaign Finances

This is a simple dashboard, built in R Shiny, providing a summary view of publicly disclosed contributions to, and expenditures by, candidate campaigns in the 2017 City of Tacoma election.

Requirements

Environment

The dashboard should run on any Shiny server. The current version was built in RStudio, and is hosted at shinyapps.io.

R Libraries

• shiny
• data.table
• ggplot2

Data

Download the following files into the data/ directory:

• 2017_Contributions.csv
• 2017_Expenditures.csv
• 2017_Tacoma_Candidates.csv

Forthcoming will be a simple shell script to install this data, which can be run as a cron . The data is at a Socrata data portal, and can be acquired with R by API, but this is probably too slow for runtime loading.

Customization

Location

The current code is Tacoma-centric, but the PDC provides data for the entire state of Washington. The following modifications can be made to regionally refocus:

• Create a new candidates csv. The current data is a filtered view of the Candidates and Committee Registrations dataset, setting jurisdiction to a relevant subset.
• On (currently) line 27 of server.R, update the filename.
• Update descriptive text in ui.R as needed.

Note: the code currently assumes unique office/position pairs. As written, it will not correctly handle matching office/positions in different jurisdictions. For example, expanding to Pierce County may include multiple different races for MAYOR, and these will be conflated.