How Political Consultants Can Share Candidate Findings Without Losing Sources

Political consultants share candidate findings with a campaign, a committee, or another desk on the same race. The opposition-research page names campaigns, party committees, PACs, and political consultants as the people who use this work, at the scale of one race, a slate, or a client moving between races. That sentence describes an audience. It is not a list of clients, and this page does not invent one. Sharing holds up when the finding that leaves the file still carries its source. The field manual is The Complete Guide to Evidence-Backed Opposition Research for Campaigns at /blog/the-complete-guide-to-evidence-backed-opposition-research-for-campaigns.

The file those findings come from is built at /blog/how-to-build-a-citation-backed-candidate-research-dossier and turned into a second-person document at /blog/how-to-turn-public-records-into-a-usable-candidate-dossier. A claim is checked before a memo at /blog/how-to-verify-political-claims-before-they-reach-a-campaign-memo. The container is compared at /blog/campaign-research-platform-vs-spreadsheets-which-workflow-holds-up. Office by office, the records differ, which is /blog/9-types-of-race-specific-research-campaign-teams-need.

Fix the finding before you shorten it

Write the legal name, the office, the jurisdiction, and the cycle on the finding. Add a middle name, a city, or a filing identifier when someone else shares the surname. The opposition-research page anchors that block to a Secretary of State filing or an FEC committee name, because a ballot name and a committee name are often different strings. A finding that starts from a nickname can attach the wrong vote or the wrong donor report, and the person who receives it will not see the mix-up if the identifier was dropped to save a line.

Then write the sentence the document supports, and only that sentence. A vote line carries the bill, the date, and the vote. A quote is the words that were said, with the date and the place. A donor line documents a reported gift. A contradiction flag stays a pointer between two sourced items, and both items stay attached. A flag with one side missing is a prompt for more research, not a finished hit. The methodology page's posture language covers the open questions: may, could, would examine, and appears consistent with.

Keep the source on the shorter page

The opposition-research page says the communications package is shorter than the research. It keeps the claim, the date, and the source, and it drops the dead ends. OppIntell calls the export a comms-ready packet. Packaging is a selection of sourced lines. It is the moment an unsourced line is easiest to add back, so the packet is checked against the file one more time. A consultant who pastes the sentence into a memo and leaves the URL in the research folder has split the finding from the record the next reader needs.

On a published briefing, the citation is a source URL plus a source type: an FEC filing, a Secretary of State portal, a court record, an official campaign site, or a government press release. The methodology page names citation_validation_status: whether the document still exists at that URL and still contains the cited language. A claim that fails stays out until the source is re-resolved. Amended reports replace earlier totals, so the shared line cites the report that is current. Independent expenditures and Super PAC reports stay with the committee they name. They are not folded into the candidate's own receipt total.

Use the receipt shape, and label the private link

The public facts page describes a permanent receipt for one published finding: the claim, a source link, a capture timestamp, a content SHA-256, and supersession history. The free-tier get_receipt tool returns provenance only, and it does not return claim text or the archived source. The route comment for a public receipt separates that page from the private share link at /share/{token}, which is noindex, watermarked, and expiring. The public receipt route ships dark behind PUBLIC_RECEIPT_PAGES_ENABLED and stays off until that flag is turned on. A shared packet can follow the receipt fields on paper even while that route is off: sentence, URL, date read, hash or version note, and a line when a later document replaces the old one.

The homepage says analyst workflows, exports, and receipts stay inside the authenticated app. The export step on the spine names receipts, citations, and watermarking. Review names analyst, senior, legal, and communications. Those are the published handoff points. This page does not describe a separate consultant portal. Research books are prepared per candidate, and profile access is priced per month, per profile. The opposition-research page says it is legal advice for no one.

Hand the same standard back

The same rule covers a contradiction flag. Both sourced items travel with the packet, or the flag is labeled as an open question. How those flags are read is /blog/contradiction-flags-in-candidate-research-common-questions-answered. What the citation has to contain is /blog/source-citations-in-political-research-your-questions-answered.

Run the same file on the candidate the consultant is paid to help. The opposition-research page calls that the mirror file, built from the same fields used on an opponent: votes where a voting record exists, statements, finance, disclosures, and court records that match the person. A vote counts as a vote on either side. The person who receives a shared finding should be able to open the same source the sender used, without a phone call to reconstruct which PDF was meant.

Which exhibits exist still depends on the office. That map is /blog/9-types-of-race-specific-research-campaign-teams-need. A mayor's filing is often at the city or county. A federal candidate's money is often in FEC filings. Four county adapters are in production, not a filing from every county. The canonical coverage sentence dated 2026-10-03 is 24,000 profiles in the public candidate-research index. The homepage counter on 2026-10-05 read 24,130. Those figures describe the index. They are not a count of shared packets or of clients.