Virginia has grown an organizational unicorn to track political money. Here’s the story behind it.

For many Virginia political junkies — and I proudly count myself among them — the morning doesn’t truly begin until I look at the daily email from the Virginia Public Access Project. It’s a compilation of news stories about politics from across Virginia that saves me the time of having to look up a dozen or more websites. By clicking on the “most-clicked” button, I can see the most-read stories of the day to get a sense of what others are reading.

Whenever there’s some significant gubernatorial appointment to a state office, the first thing journalists — and lots of others — do is check VPAP to see how much money that appointee has given to determine if this is some kind of political payoff. 

And on election night, the best place to watch the returns isn’t a news site, or even the Department of Elections website, it’s VPAP — because VPAP does the best job of taking the state’s own election data and turning it into something that’s easier to search.

The VPAP website is such an essential tool in Virginia politics that it’s hard to remember how we functioned without it.

David Poole remembers — because David Poole started VPAP, back in 1997, at the very dawn of the internet era in Virginia journalism.

Today, VPAP — a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose board always has a careful mix from both parties — stands as an institution in Virginia politics, a trusted one at a time when trust in others of longer standing has eroded.

There was a time, though, when VPAP was an idea, not an institution, and a controversial one at that. Anyone who cares about Virginia politics now will be fascinated by the politics back then that gave rise to VPAP. Those are the people who ought to read Poole’s book, “Trusted Source: How a Virginia Nonprofit Gained Bipartisan Support in an Era of Political Polarization,” just published this week by the University of Virginia Press. 

Poole was a journalist before VPAP and now, after retiring from the organization in 2023, is back in the fray. You may have spotted his byline a few times as a freelancer in Cardinal News and will again in the future. By way of disclosure, Poole and I go way back. We were once colleagues at The Roanoke Times, and the nature of our respective jobs has kept us in touch over the years; his desk was on the other side of a small partition from mine — I can still hear the sound of Poole excitedly jawing with a juicy source or giving a hard time to a politician he felt was not as forthcoming as he should be. The Virginia political world is often small, and the world of Virginia political journalism gets smaller each year. On the other hand, virtually the entire story Poole tells in “Trusted Source” is new to me, so it will be new to others, as well.

It’s also an important one. VPAP grew directly out of Virginia’s uncommon laws regarding campaign finance. It’s one of just five states that do not impose any limits on how much money can be given to a political campaign. As the line goes in the musical “Hamilton,” “Everything is legal in New Jersey.” Or, in this case, Virginia. Perhaps another song lyric applies, as well, this from the Travelling Wilburys song “Tweeter and the Monkey Man,” sung by Bob Dylan: “Anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught.”

While Virginia allows donations of any size, and from anyone or anything (corporations included), it also requires what amounts to maximum disclosure: Anything $100 and up must be reported. The catch was that for years those campaign finance reports existed in a single place: In the state elections office in Richmond. I remember many years ago getting up early and driving across half the state so I could spend a day rooting through boxes of almost indecipherable paper records.

For practical purposes, there was no disclosure. Then along came the internet — and what Poole describes as an old-fashioned newspaper war. By then, Poole was a Richmond-based reporter for the Norfolk and Roanoke papers, which then had the same owner. In 1995, a year that saw General Assembly elections midway through George Allen’s term as governor, the state’s two biggest newspapers — the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Norfolk-based Virginian-Pilot — took it upon themselves to take those campaign finance reports, enter them into a computer database and write stories about whatever trends emerged. The two papers competed to see who could come up with the most insightful stories about the relationship between money and power.

That newspaper war was short-lived. We didn’t realize it then, but that was probably the height of newspaper journalism. The saddest part of Poole’s book (for me, anyway) comes early on when he describes the election of 1995: “The next morning, readers of The Roanoke Times awoke to a newspaper crammed with thirteen state election articles penned by fourteen reporters.” (I was one of those 14.) Today, there may not be a news organization in Virginia with that many reporters. (Cardinal has 10 now, thanks to the generosity of our readers.) After that frantic, but rival, effort to keyboard in all the campaign finance reports in 1995, The Pilot and the Times-Dispatch “concluded their newsroom budgets could not sustain their efforts into 1997, when Virginia would elect its next governor.” They called a truce and looked for ways to collaborate. Out of that, VPAP was born, with Poole as executive director and its only employee.

What seems so logical now did not then — and may still not to some from other states that don’t have anything like VPAP.  These days, it is not unusual to find groups that track political money. Many, if not most, of them, though, take a political position — that campaign money is bad and ought to be regulated. VPAP has adhered strictly to a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. You want disclosure? Here it is. What you do with it after that is up to you. In the world of campaign finance reporting, it is something of a unicorn. At the book’s end, Poole cites 10 reasons for VPAP’s success. The first of those might be the most important: “VPAP grew organically out of the state’s political culture.” Accordingly, it has resisted temptations to expand its model to other states and instead doubled or tripled or quadrupled down on providing data about Virginia politics — not news, certainly not opinion, but just data. You want to see who has given money to one of the candidates for governor? Look on VPAP. You want to see candidates’ financial disclosures? Look on VPAP. You want to see who’s signed up as lobbyists? Look on VPAP. 

Poole’s book weaves together multiple threads: how different elections forced different innovations in how VPAP collected and presented its data, the changing technology that made all this possible and the organizational challenges involved to keep up with all this money. One example: Mark Warner’s 2001 campaign for governor used three different committees, before VPAP had the ability to aggregate all those donations to show their full impact.

Much of that is more interesting than it would seem. One of my favorite stories involves Poole showing off the original VPAP site to state legislators, many of whom were completely unfamiliar with computers. Suddenly, with just a few keystrokes, then-House Minority Leader Vance Wikins, R-Amherst County, could see that one particular company had given $10,000 to Democrats but only $5,000 to Republicans. Poole describes Wilkins’ response like this: “He picked up on the phone and got the company’s lobbyist on the line. After a string of expletives, Wilkins demanded: ‘Where is my five thousand dollars?’ I’m pretty sure Wilkins expected to hear ‘The check’s in the mail.’ Instead, he was told, ‘That’s not true. Who told you that?’” 

Before VPAP, the excuse would have worked. Now, suddenly, it did not — and not everyone was happy about that. “I’m all for disclosure,” then-Del. Ken Melvin, D-Portsmouth, said, “but this is too much.”

For those who like political gossip (and what political junkie doesn’t?), there are some delicious tidbits here — such as the time Poole almost got fired because VPAP published an infographic that was more politically charged than some board members thought wise. VPAP has always prided itself on not taking sides, but sometimes the data speaks more strongly about one side than the other. 

One of the things that ramped up VPAP’s reach came when it began publishing a roundup of political news stories in 2011. In practice, it took over something called “the Whipple Report.” Tom Whipple was a retired CIA analyst. His wife, Mary Margaret, was a Democratic state senator from Arlington. In the early days of the internet, he got up early and scoured the web for “open source” intelligence — newspaper stories about Virginia politics. He started by printing them out and giving them to a neighbor, Bill Dolan, who was planning to run for attorney general. As word spread, Whipple started emailing his daily compilation of news to Democrats and Republicans alike. Whipple was a news aggregator before we knew what that was. 

When his wife retired from the state Senate, Whipple gave his list to VPAP, which retained the name the Whipple Report. The news clips made VPAP a daily must-read in a way it hadn’t been before; they also earned the ire of Republicans. “I got an earful from Delegate Ben Cline, a conservative Republican who would later win a congressional seat representing the Shenandoah Valley,” Poole writes. “Cline told me that Republicans had a hard time with a product named after a Democrat. Unless we changed the name, he said, the clips would never gain full acceptance from GOP readers.”

VPAP changed the name. “Cline had a point,” Poole writes. Being nonpartisan is a key VPAP value, one that many partisans on both sides find hard to grasp in these polarized days.

Today, it’s through those news clips that many people know VPAP — and don’t realize its original (and still core) function as a tracker of political money. Poole addresses some of the challenges of maintaining those clips as newspaper staffs dwindle. VPAP decided early on to omit bloggers because many of them are openly partisan and don’t have the layers of editing that newspapers traditionally do. That distinction between newspapers and non-newspapers became harder to define as online-only news outlets arose; VPAP had to craft new rules to include them but still exclude the partisan sites. We at Cardinal owe some of our success to VPAP. Before we launched, we talked with Poole to make sure that we complied with VPAP’s standards to be included in the clips. Making that cut quickly introduced us to the state’s political class better than any marketing campaign could have done and helped us develop a statewide audience we hadn’t planned on. To this day, we still encounter readers from outside our coverage area in Southwest and Southside who say they learned of us “through VPAP.”

Whenever I need some political fact quickly — Who’s running in this district? Who is that legislator’s biggest donor? How are new voter registrations running compared with previous cycles? — VPAP is where I always turn first.

It is, indeed, a “trusted source.” I learned a lot from Poole’s book, even though our paths have crossed back and forth many times over the years. You will, too.