Campaign Wage Theft Project

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The Campgaign Wage Theft Project

About this project

The Campaign Wage Theft Project is holding local candidates accountable for their labor practices.

Explore the data Follow Our Work

What is this for?

Politicians in the District of Columbia almost universally purport to support workers. We analyzed campaign finance filings for every Democrat running for office under DC’s Fair Elections program in 2026 and found that despite union endorsements and pro-labor platforms, local campaigns regularly classify employees as contractors, shifting major costs from the campaign to its staff and depriving them of benefits and legal protections.

What is the difference between an employee and a contractor?

Employers generally classify their workers either as employees or as contractors. Employees work under the supervision of their employer, performing tasks they’re instructed to do the way they’re told to do them.

On a campaign, employees include people like canvassers, campaign managers, and call time managers employed directly by the campaign. Contractors include people like consultants, photographers paid by the project, or professional fundraisers who work with multiple clients.

Unlike contractors, employees:

  • are legally protected by labor laws and can qualify for unemployment benefits
  • may receive health insurance and paid time off
  • are entitled to workers compensation if they’re injured on the job
  • pay half of their payroll taxes, with their employer paying the other half — contractors pay the full 15.3% self-employment tax

Did campaigns know you would publish this?

We gave every notice on Monday, June 8th to every campaign flagged that we would publish this data. Some of them responded, either admitting fault and committing to fix their error or denying responsibility. Most did not respond.

We hope that this project encourages all campaigns to compensate their workers fairly and in compliance with labor regulations.

Why Fair Elections?

We only analyzed Fair Elections candidates running in the Democratic primary. Due to the short timeline and manual analysis necessary to make this happen (see our methodology below) before the June 16th primary, we chose to narrow our focus.

Fair Elections candidates, due to being well-funded, run competitive campaigns; further, we feel that campaigns funded by taxpayers should especially be held to account for failing to pay taxes themselves.

Who made this?

This website was designed by humans at LeadBlue in Washington, DC. LeadBlue creates technology that Democrats use to win. We intend to publish the source code for this project to enable anyone to easily create a candidate scorecard website.

LeadBlue is led by Joyce DeCerce. You can find him @JoyceDecerce on Twitter. His email is joyce@leadblue.us.

You can reach our team at info@campaignwagetheft.org.

Our Methodology

  1. We downloaded all expenditures of Fair Elections campaign committees and narrowed to Operating Expenditures.
  2. Pulling a full list of unique expenditure purposes, we manually identified purposes that were likely staff-related or likely payroll-related. Staff-related purposes were those likely to describe a payment to a person for a service. Payroll-related purposes were those likely to indicate a payment that was a part of a payroll process, like one to a payroll provider, for payroll taxes, or for workers compensation insurance.
  3. We flagged payments with the following words, case-insensitive, in the payee field as likely-payroll:
    • Gusto
    • Intuit
    • Quickbooks
    • ADP
    • Paychex
    • Deel
    • OnPay
    • Square
    • Government
    • District of Columbia
    • DC
    • Office
    • Tax
    • Revenue
    • CFO
    • Financial
    • Finance
    • Pay
    • Account
  4. We flagged any expenditures to an individual for review as likely-staff.
  5. We reviewed likely-payroll expenditures for the following factors to evaluate the likelihood that the campaign classified at least some staff as employees.
    • Is this expenditure actually related to payroll?
    • How much was the expenditure?
    • How often was it made?
    • Is this campaign more likely than not classifying any staff as employees?
  6. Among likely-staff expenditures, we excluded payments to organizations, except for those made to organizations that appeared in fact to be individuals based on name or address.
  7. We reviewed expenditures reported as payments for consultants or contractors and evaluated if there was a material likelihood that the payee was actually an employee, based on the number, amount, and frequency of payments, the job title of the individual, and research of each payee. We chose to be conservative in our evaluations, and gave campaigns the benefit of the doubt where there was substantial uncertainty.
  8. We reviewed likely-payroll expenditures for the following factors to evaluate the likelihood that the campaign misclassified any employees as contractors.
    • Was this individual paid only one time?
    • Was this payment likely to be project-based?
    • Was the expenditure a round number?
    • Is this payee more likely a contractor or an employee?

Click here to see our data.