How to search the MoJo 400

The MoJo 400 page allows you to search the Federal Election Commission. data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics on donations by the members of the MoJo 400 for the period of 1984 to 1995.

RULE NUMBER ONE: This is a very big database, and the search engine takes a little time to find the information that matches your criteria. The time it takes for each query will vary, but in general you can expect it will take more time than it takes to load the average page.

In the left column are the names of the fields in the database. In the center column you can fill out whatever you want to match. When you submit the form only those records in the database matching your criteria will be shown. The third column contains check-boxes to select which fields you want to see displayed. (You can do a match on a field that you choose not to display.) Finally, below the match boxes in the middle column there is a menu from which you can select the field you wish your search results to be sorted by. All fields are sorted in either alphabetical or numerical order except date, which is sorted chronologically and amount of donation which is sorted in reverse numerical order (i.e. largest donations first.)

An empty box will match all records (for that field) so if you are only interested in one or two criteria you only need to enter something for those fields. (So, to see the whole database you could just leave all the fields blank. But it's a big database so be careful, especially if you have a slow net connection.)

All matches are case insensitive so 'clinton' and 'Clinton' and 'CLINTON' will all match the same records and matches are made on any part of the given field so 'clinton' will match 'Bill Clinton' or 'Hillary Clinton'. In the state or zip field you can enter either two characters which will be interpreted as a two-letter state abbreviation or five numbers which will be treated as a zip code. The Date of Donation field has two boxes so you can enter a range of dates. If you want all donations after a certain date, put the date in the first box. If you want all donations after the date, put it in the second box.

For more flexible searches you can use regular expressions. For the technically minded you can use any Perl 5 regular expression. For the not so technically minded all you really need to know is that a . matches any character and .+ matches anything (actually any character one or more times.) And a ^ matches only at the beginning of the field and $ matches at the end. So here are a few simple examples.

• 'f' matches if field contains an 'f'.
• 'f.' matches if field contains an 'f' followed by any character.
• '^f' matches if field starts with 'f'.
• '^f.$ matches if field contains only two letters, the first being 'f'.
• '^f.+p$' matches if field starts with f and ends with p with anything in between.

Have fun. Start searching!