“Who am I running against?”
Most campaigns commit their budget before they know who they are actually running against. The field is read off a news story and a memory of the last cycle; the opponent’s money, record, and backing get looked at properly in September, when there is nothing left to do about it. BlueList’s Race Intelligence Reports move that work to the front. They read the field from public filings, published records, and the press — who is running, which of them can win, what is in their record, and who decides the race around the candidates — and keep reading it every week once the race is underway.
Sold individually or as a package; scope and lead time are set per engagement.
Before you commit a budget, you want to know who else is running, which of them can actually beat you, and what is in their record. This is the race-entry deep dive, built around four bodies of work. A client strategic profile reads your own record the way an opponent’s researcher will read it, so nothing in it is a surprise later. Competitor strategic profiles cover every declared and likely candidate, sorted into four threat tiers. Confidential opposition research memoranda go deep on the highest-threat opponents only. And an institutional landscape analysis covers the organizations that decide the race around the candidates — endorsers, committees, donor networks, local party structures.
A race strategy summary synthesizes across all four and answers the question the package exists for: which lane is open, and what does owning it cost. Every vulnerability is scored on six dimensions before it is cleared for use, including backfire risk — which is why some findings arrive with a recommendation not to use them.
A race changes every week, and nobody on a campaign has time to watch it full time. This is the standing brief. It opens with a baseline report on the race — district profile, opponent fundraising, opponent advertising, incumbent voting record, and a competitive summary — and is then re-cut on a weekly cadence around what changed, with the same treatment applied out of cycle when something lands that shouldn’t wait: a new campaign finance filing, a new ad campaign, an independent expenditure by an outside committee.
Every source is public and free, which is deliberate: it means the brief costs the same to keep running in month nine as in month one, and a client can audit any line in it themselves. Nothing reaches the campaign unreviewed — every edition is read by a person before it is sent, so a filing that technically changed but does not matter arrives described that way instead of as an alarm.
Who is getting written about in this race, where, and what is being said? A systematic scan of local newspapers, community sites, neighborhood blogs, and regional outlets covering every candidate in the race, returned as a digest: what ran, who was quoted, what the tone was, and how coverage is divided among the field. Useful before entering a race to see whose narrative already exists, and useful during one to catch a story on the day it runs rather than the week after.
Taken as a single scan when a campaign wants to know the shape of coverage before it moves, or repeated through the race at whatever interval the race warrants. The source list is assembled for the specific district rather than pulled from a national feed, which is what catches the community paper and the neighborhood blog that a wire service never indexes.
You have decided to run. What do you actually do in the first ninety days? A one-time package assembled for one specific race rather than a template with the district name changed: a voter file pull with target universes already cut, a one-page district profile, a ninety-day calendar, a budget template, sample ad copy with targeting recommendations, a prioritized canvassing walk list, and a compliance checklist for the candidate’s own jurisdiction. It is the alternative to spending the first two months of a campaign assembling these things one at a time.
Assembled against the candidate’s own jurisdiction rather than a generic template, which is the part that matters: a school board race and a legislative primary have different filing calendars, different universes, and different first weeks. Scoped at the start of an engagement so the calendar it hands over starts on a real date.
Endorsements are decided months before anyone votes, by organizations with published processes and deadlines a first-time candidate can miss without ever knowing they existed. This maps the endorsing organizations in a jurisdiction — unions, Democratic clubs, advocacy groups, elected officials, community organizations — with each one’s process, its timeline, who it has backed before, and how well its past endorsements have tracked with winning. The output is as much a calendar as a directory: what to apply for, and by when.
Quoted per jurisdiction rather than per race, because the endorser landscape is researched and assembled for that jurisdiction rather than pulled off a shelf — and because once it exists, it serves every campaign that runs there afterward.
When your opponent starts spending, you want to know that week — not when the mail lands. A standing watch on the public advertising archive the major social platforms are required to publish, covering both the opponent’s own committee and the outside committees spending on their behalf, with alerts when new ads launch, when spend moves significantly, and when the message shifts. Sold on its own or alongside the District Intelligence Report, whose competitive summary it feeds.
The archive records the creative itself, not just the spend, so the log is a running history of what your opponent has decided to say — which is usually more useful than the dollar figure. A message that appears, gets tested for a week, and disappears tells you something the totals never will.
The same method underlies the whole family. Not every step applies to every report — where one does not, the description says so.
What travels between states, and what has to be checked first.
Federal candidates file with a single agency, on a single schedule, in a single published format — so the finance layer of these reports behaves the same way in every state for a congressional race. Below the federal level it fragments: each state runs its own campaign finance system, with its own filing calendar, its own itemization thresholds, and its own search interface. Some publish clean bulk data. Some publish scanned images. Municipal and school district races are the least standardized of all.
BlueList assesses the jurisdiction before quoting work in it: what is filed, how often, in what form, and how far back it goes. That assessment is the first step of any engagement in a new state, and it is what determines both price and delivery schedule.
These are research products, built from the public record. BlueList does not conduct surveillance, does not contact opponents or the people around them, does not obtain records by misrepresentation, and does not buy personal data about individuals. BlueList does not place stories with reporters, does not file complaints with election authorities, and is not legal counsel — where a finding raises a legal question, the report says so and stops there.
Tell us about the race. We will map which reports fit it, what they cover in your jurisdiction, and what they cost there.