A Virginia political scribe recalls the dark ages of covering campaigns and elections before VPAP

The Virginia Public Access Project websites homepage. (Photo courtesy VPAP)

We Virginians are about to elect our 75th governor, the first woman to hold the office. For those not yet up to speed, you can learn quite a lot about Democrat Abigail Spanberger or Republican Winsome Earle-Sears in very short order.

For instance, in two or three clicks — less than five seconds — you can see how many millions of dollars their campaigns have raised, who gave each the most and how they’ve spent it. That alone tells you who will have the next governor’s ear the next four years.

We take that knowledge for granted now. “Just VPAP it,” we say, using the acronym for the Virginia Public Access Project as a verb just as off-handedly as we’d say, “Google it.”

What’s amazing to folks of my advancing years is how relatively new all of this is and the unlikely way VPAP evolved out of a journalistic aspiration to democratize essential information about who runs our state and local governments, and the money (and influence) behind them.

Consider: Of the 74 men who’ve enjoyed the honorific “His Excellency” (it’s actually a thing!), universal and free online access to detailed, curated, analyzed and actionable campaign finance data has existed only since the election of governor No. 68, Jim Gilmore, 28 years ago.

The data was there. It was on paper in filing cabinets in the offices of the State Board of Elections (now the State Department of Elections). Anyone was free to inspect the tens of thousands of pages, stacked feet high, Monday through Friday during business hours (except, of course, on government holidays).

That was the Virginia way. The commonwealth had resisted reforms to limit the amounts of donations to candidates, as the federal system does. Rather, in Virginia, the rule has always been to give what you want but disclose all you give. Sounds great until you want to actually know the details.

That began to change in 1994 and 1995 when two newspapers — the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and the Richmond Times-Dispatch — undertook separate, independent efforts to key data from those paper campaign finance reports into an electronic table and engage in the hot trend of the time, Computer-Assisted Reporting.

In the 1994 midterms two years into Bill Clinton’s presidency, contributions surged toward Republican House and Senate candidates, presaging a Red Wave election that gave the GOP both houses of Congress for the first time since 1955. The two papers deployed teams to review reams of paper reports ahead of the 1995 General Assembly elections and build datasets to see if that was happening in Virginia. On the Pilot’s two-person team was David Poole, a lean, bespectacled and inquisitive Capitol reporter.

The anticipated Republican Capitol Square takeover didn’t materialize in 1995. The groundbreaking data reporting the newspapers did showed that candidates spent a record $20 million with all 140 seats up for grabs. Poole’s team found that the nine political action committees that gave the most to legislative candidates directed 95% of their largesse to sitting lawmakers. The RTD wrote about how donors used PACs as a passthrough to give money without leaving footprints as direct contributions did.

Those details about the embryonic days of what became VPAP are in Poole’s book “Trusted Source,” published this year. It chronicles the growth of the nonprofit group he led from its inception into the ubiquitous presence in Virginia public life that it is now.

“We came along very early when the internet was still kind of happening. A lot of states ended up computerizing (campaign finance) records, but they’re really just giant PDF farms,” Poole said in an interview last week, noting that making sense of those bare-bones sites required users to invest hours or days of tedium to extract useful information.

Virginia’s reluctance to digitize its political money records went beyond its unhurried pace of change. Elected officials were happy to keep the data on paper only, largely rendering the “disclose” part of the Virginia way meaningless. Poole, more than anyone, forced change. He left newspapering, harnessed the growth of affordable, interconnected desktop computing and made meaningful disclosure real in Virginia.

I remember those early days. It began as a consortium of Virginia newspapers — the RTD and the Pilot joined by the Roanoke Times, the Washington Post and the (Newport News) Daily Press — brought together by my boss, Dorothy Abernathy, then the Virginia bureau chief for The Associated Press. The papers underwrote the creation of a campaign finance database they would share for the 1997 governor’s race, and Poole took the reins.

Poole foresaw the decline of ad-supported print news and a place for a nonprofit to make public campaign information public free and more accessible via the internet. According to his book, the first bare-bones iteration of VPAP.org — the nonpartisan, nonprofit portal tracking money in Virginia politics — debuted online on June 13, 1997, sourcing its data straight from the Virginia Department of Elections.

“It revolutionized covering campaign finance and politics,” said Pam Stallsmith, a retired longtime RTD Capitol correspondent and opinion page editor. VPAP made it easier for journalists to follow the money — guidance that ultimately exposed the Watergate crimes — all over the commonwealth, she said.

VPAP is why anyone can “figure out what’s going on with the oceans of campaign cash flowing in the commonwealth,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a University of Mary Washington political science professor and former reporter. “Any time an out-of-state reporter asks me about politics in Virginia, I make sure to direct them to VPAP.”

There were constant obstacles to keeping VPAP viable. Labor-intensive data mining, accuracy checking and coding was exhausting work for a staff as small as two. Finding money to sustain its work as a 501(c)(3) charity was a constant challenge. All of that commanded Poole’s attention, sometimes on nights, weekends and holidays.

“I realized that VPAP had to be more than one guy spinning eight plates at once,” Poole said.

Capitol Square is infamous for its intrigues and shifting alliances. That’s why I believe Poole’s most amazing feat was satisfying the demands and keeping the trust of core donors and stakeholders — elected officials, political parties and professionals, lobbyists and journalists with their often conflicting roles — while keeping VPAP true to its mission as an independent, fair, nonpartisan purveyor of value-added information. A miscalculation here, an overreach there, an indiscreet word spoken near the wrong ears and everything could have imploded.

Poole retired from VPAP two years ago. He left it with a large, diverse pool of regular donors, money in the bank, and a sophisticated staff that still pushes boundaries of using interactive visuals to make an ever-wider array of data easily understood.

VPAP will be at it again tomorrow on election night. That’s when the savviest politicos inside Virginia and elsewhere will turn to the site for the most advanced, graphically compelling, instantly updated returns available to learn firsthand who will be the first to be called Her Excellency.