Yesterday, the FEC released a fascinating press release on congressional candidate receipts and expenditures during the 2007-2008 election cycle. What makes this information particularly helpful is that the FEC put its data into context: it released PDFs and spreadsheets with the numbers it used to derive summaries of candidate fund-raising and expenditures, including historical trends.

Suppose, for example,  you’re curious about how much it costs to win an election in the House. In 2008, the 232 incumbent Democrats in the House raised on average $1,191,622, and spent $1,027,568; the 170 Republican incumbents raised $1,246,301 and spent $1,119,622. So, the average Republican incumbent outraised the average Democratic incumbent by $54,679, and outspent the average incumbent by $915,626.

And, if you look at the forty-odd open seats, Democrats raised on average $1,564,740 versus Republicans’  $1,246,321; and spent $1,389,054 versus $1,276,540. In other words, the average Democrat competing for an open seat raised $318,489 more and spent $112,514 more.

Additionally, Democratic challengers to incumbents also outspent Republican challengers to incumbents by a hefty margin, although there were less Democratic challengers than Republicans. The 166 Democratic challengers to Republican incumbents raised on average $134,030 and spent $126,278; the 195 Republicans raised on average $29,716 and spent $28,085. That’s a huge difference. (The 93 Democrats that challenged incumbent Republicans or fought over an open seat raised over $400,000; only 74 Republicans reached that number.)

Political Action Committees may have had the whip hand in all this fundraising. They raised $300 million dollars for House candidates during the 2008 election cycle, constituting 31% of their total income. Candidates that won raised a total of $636 million, of which $254.4 million came from PACs. In other words, 40% of winning candidates’ money came from PACs.

Of course, this isn’t the full picture. There are still “independent” expenditures in favor of a candidate. In some instances, it’s more than the winning candidate spent. For example, for Minnesota’s third district, the winning candidate spent approximately $5.6 million, but outside independent expenditures totaled slightly more than $6 million. It’s nice to have friends.

As useful as this information is, it is not complete. The data is being released a year after the end of the election.  (Perhaps it had been released previously — although then why would there be a press release now?)  The rules for filing with the FEC do not require many useful kinds of data to be reported. And, with respect to the Senate, campaign finance data isn’t filed in a timely fashion. That’s why Sunlight supports the passage of S. 482, which would require electronic filing for Senators.