The Lexington Times is launching two new public databases today: KREF Watch, which tracks who funds Kentucky political campaigns, and KLEC Watch, which tracks who pays to lobby the Kentucky General Assembly. Both are free, both cover roughly a decade of records, and both are searchable down to the i ndividual contribution and the individual lobbying contract. Together they put about $689 million in disclosed political money — campaign giving on one side, lobbying spending on the other — into a form anyone can search, sort, and link to. KREF Watch: who funds Kentucky politics krefwatch.com aggregates every itemized contribution filed with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance for 28 elections from 2016 through the current cycle: roughly 537,000 contributions totaling $466 million, across every race from governor to county jailer. You can look up any candidate’s full donor list, search donors by name, city, or employer, and see which employers’ people give the most. The data is cleaned in ways the state’s own portal doesn’t attempt: variant employer spellings are merged (“Commonwealth of Ky,” “State of Kentucky” and four other spellings roll up together), and candidates’ self-funding — including loans candidates make to their own campaigns under their own names — is broken out separately so the “top donors” lists show actual donors. In the May 2026 primary alone, candidates put $6.9 million of their own money into their campaigns. KLEC Watch: who lobbies Frankfort klecwatch.com aggregates lobbying disclosures filed with the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission from 2015 to present: $223 million in reported spending by more than 1,000 employers and the roughly 550 registered lobbyists they hire. Lobbying Frankfort is a growth industry. Reported spending climbed from $18.4 million in 2015 to a record $27.9 million in 2025, led this cycle by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, the Kentucky Education Association, and the state’s hospital and health-care interests. For the 2025 and 2026 sessions, the site also indexes which bills each employer disclosed lobbying — more than 1,800 distinct bills. One example of what that surfaces: 190 different employers disclosed lobbying House Bill 500 this session, the most of any bill. The two sites talk to each other Because both databases normalize organization names the same way, they cross-reference: an employer’s page on KREF Watch links to its lobbying record on KLEC Watch, and vice versa, for the roughly 590 organizations that appear in both. That’s the view that usually takes a records request and a spreadsheet to build — campaign giving and lobbying spending for the same organization, side by side. Open data, open source Everything on both sites is published as open JSON anyone can build on (see krefwatch.com/llms.txt and klecwatch.com/llms.txt), and the full source code for both — data pipelines included — is on GitHub (krefwatch, klecwatch). Both sites refresh automatically every week, so they will stay current through the November general election and the next legislative session. Caveats, because this is records data Filings lag — pre-election reporting deadlines mean the most recent giving may not appear yet. Donors are grouped by name, so two people with the same name can merge and a misspelled filing can split one person in two. Employer and occupation fields are self-reported. KLEC’s historical files for 2018 were never archived, so that year is missing, and 2017 covers only the legislative session. Where it matters, verify against the original filings — every page links back to the source agency. Neither site is affiliated with the Registry or the Commission. The statewide campaign-finance tracker exists, in part, because a fellow Kentucky publisher asked us how hard it would be to build. The answer turned out to be: one day. If you build something on this data, or spot something in it worth a story, write us at [email protected]. This announcement was drafted with AI assistance (claude-fable-5) and finalized for publication by The Lexington Times. The databases it describes were built from Kentucky Registry of Election Finance and Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission public records; figures were computed directly from those records. View in feeds The post Introducing KREF Watch and KLEC Watch: two new free databases tracking money in Kentucky politics appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less