Follow the money: New tool from Bing maps the flow of campaign cash

How do the billions of dollars shaping this election seep through the United States?

A new project from Microsoft's Bing and political tech firm Circa Victor looks to answer that question by drawing on dozens of types of public disclosures.

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Location data on vendors that serve campaigns and super PACs is fed into Circa Victor's system in real time, giving visitors a rough picture of how much each candidate is spending in each state.

The company claims the entire process is quick enough that it oftentimes updates before donations are officially tallied and tracked.

Using this data, the team added a panel within the search engine that is cued every time someone looks for information related to political spending -- trigger terms include phrases like "Clinton spending" or "election predictions."

Hover the cursor over a state to see totals for each of the four candidates -- Democrat Hillary Clinton, GOP pick Donald Trump, Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson -- or select from a dropdown menu for a fuller profile.

You can also find an ideological breakdown of each contender's leanings on particular policy points like abortion, drug policy and environmental issues. The tool reveals Trump to be somewhat liberal on LGBT rights and drug policy and only mildly conservative on tax reform, while Clinton remains staunchly progressive across the board.

Stark differences in which industries are backing each also say a lot about their respective priorities.

Election 2016 Campaign Landscape - Bing

Thanks to the Trump campaign's unconventional choice to skip out on ads, the Clinton camp has spent nearly twice as much on the national scale with a total bill of nearly $740 million.

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The gap may also be related to Trump's infamously lacking ground game -- the web of door-knocking armies, phone banks and field offices on which campaigns traditionally rely. Trump has instead leaned heavily on the resources of the Republican Party, with which he has a notoriously stormy relationship.

While both nominees orchestrate their respective vote-farming operations from power centers in New York, Trump has spent considerably less in the decidedly blue state, despite vows to win his home turf.

Another pressure point in the political nervous system is Washington, D.C., where both presidential aspirants channel funds toward media buyers and consultants who then distribute them nationally. Clinton has spent around $270 million there, compared to Trump's $42 million.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises, however, is the Trump campaign's lavish spending in California, a diverse, famously liberal state. There, Trump has outspent Clinton by around $5 million with a nearly $36 million tab.

Trump is vastly outspending Clinton in California. Credit: bing

While Trump has boasted about carrying the massive state in the past, polls show him behind Clinton there by 24 points.

“We’re going to play heavy, as an example, in California,” the real estate mogul promised rally-goers in Montana this May.

Meanwhile, search interest in the two candidates strongly favors Trump, who leads Clinton in all 50 states -- though given Trump's salacious image, those stats might not be an indicator of anything in particular beyond Americans' tabloid mentality.

The Trump campaign has been most noteworthy for its bare-bones spending -- until very recently, he'd spent nothing on TV spots. But with the final vote looming, the GOP nominee has pumped a massive -- or "big league" as the reality TV star might say -- flux of cash into ads, racking up a bill of nearly $43 million.

The campaigns are also not the only players in the election. Super PACs have spent more than $143 million on Clinton and $40 million on Trump.

BONUS: Who pays for political campaigns?