Upper Left Strategies

01

Who paid this firm

Every paying committee, largest disclosed total first. The total is what that committee reported paying to 2 spellings of the payee name, merged by us; where a committee has a page here, its name links to it.

Showing 60 of 91 paying committees; the 31 not shown are in the total above and in the PDC file.

Source Public Disclosure Commission expenditure filings (tijg-9zyp), 2021–2026 · as of 2026-09-05 · rows 60 · retrieved 2026-09-05 · key payee name as filed, upper-cased, punctuation and corporate suffixes (LLC, Inc, Co…) stripped — a normalised string, not an identifier the PDC issues · caveat a payment routed through this firm to a subvendor appears here under this firm, as filed

02

Payments by cycle

Disclosed payments to 2 spellings of the payee name, merged by us, by the election year the paying committee filed under. One bar scale; the figure beside each bar is the figure. Odd years are local elections and even years state and federal, so consecutive years are not comparable.

1. 2021

   local cycle

   $721,757

2. 2022

   state and federal cycle

   $1,053,644

3. 2023

   local cycle

   $751,241

4. 2024

   state and federal cycle

   $743,212

5. 2025

   local cycle

   $1,055,267

6. 2026

   state and federal cycle

   $393,719

Source Public Disclosure Commission expenditure filings (tijg-9zyp), election_year as filed · as of 2026-09-05 · scale $1,055,267 = full width · key payee name as filed, upper-cased, punctuation and corporate suffixes (LLC, Inc, Co…) stripped — a normalised string, not an identifier the PDC issues

03

Same race, both sides of the wall

A candidate’s committee and a committee making independent expenditures in that candidate’s race may not coordinate; both may hire the same printer. Each row is a race where both paid this firm, with the days between the last candidate payment and the first independent expenditure, and whether that gap falls inside the twelve-month window in which WAC 390-05-210 presumes coordination unless rebutted. Overlap is lawful. This table is a list of coincidences in public filings, not a finding.

Source Same-race overlap layer over PDC expenditure (tijg-9zyp) and independent-expenditure (67cp-h962) filings; committee registrations for the officer column · as of 2026-09-01 · rows 3 · n 3 inside the twelve-month window · key race = the candidate’s office and jurisdiction as filed; the IE committee’s target is that candidate · caveat overlap is lawful and is not a finding of coordination

04

How these records were merged

The PDC issues no vendor identifier. Every figure on this page is the sum of rows whose payee name normalises to one string: UPPER LEFT STRATEGIES. That is our join, not the state’s, and its size is 2 spellings of the payee name, merged by us.

The key

payee name as filed, upper-cased, punctuation and corporate suffixes (LLC, Inc, Co…) stripped — a normalised string, not an identifier the PDC issues

Spellings merged

• Upper Left Strategies 77 payer-year rows
• UPPER LEFT STRATEGIES 17 payer-year rows

What a wrong merge looks like

Two different firms whose names differ only in a suffix or punctuation would be one row here, and their totals would be added. Two spellings of one firm that differ in a word would be two rows, and this page would be short a spelling. Both errors are ours; neither is in the filings. Corrections are taken at the address in the cite block.

Why this is not a graph node

The entity graph’s vendor nodes are one per disclosed identity and are never merged by name. This profile is the opposite decision, made for reading, and it is kept out of the graph so a merge of ours never becomes an edge.

Source Payee names as filed in PDC expenditure reports, normalised by build-vendors.js · as of 2026-09-05 · n 2 spellings over 94 payer-year rows · tier composite — joined by us on the key above

05

What this page will not compute

A firm page is where a reader expects a verdict about the firm. Each of these would be one, and none follows from payee rows on a form.

No finding of coordination.

Overlap is lawful. A candidate and an independent-expenditure committee hiring the same firm is two contracts, and the twelve-month window in section 03 is a presumption the law lets either party rebut. The table lists the coincidence and stops.

No share of a race.

What fraction of a race’s spending went through this firm would need every committee’s every payment, resolved to the same merge. We do not have that, and a share computed from part of it would be wrong with confidence.

No “network”.

Clients who share a vendor are not connected to each other by that fact. A diagram of them would draw relationships the filings do not record.

No company facts.

This page describes payments to spellings of a name. It does not say what the firm is, who owns it, or what it did for the money; the expenditure description field is not reliable enough to summarise.

No connected-records section.

A merged profile is not a node in the entity graph and draws no edges. The graph’s vendor nodes are one per disclosed identity; this page is deliberately not one of them.

Cite this page

This is public-records reporting. Use it, and say where it came from.

“Upper Left Strategies — Washington political firm profile,” WashingtonIndependents.org, data as of 2026-09-05, accessed 2026-09-19. https://washingtonindependents.org/firms/upper-left-strategies/

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Our tables, figures and notes on this page are released under CC BY 4.0 — reuse them, including commercially, with attribution. The underlying records are public records of the State of Washington and were never ours to license.

06

Where this page comes from

Every figure above is read from a primary source and rebuilt on a schedule. Nothing here is modelled or inferred; where a source is silent the page says so rather than filling the gap.

Why this firm has a page

Appears in the same-race overlap layer. Profiles exist for the firms in the independent-expenditures and coordination analysis, not for every payee; a listing is a description of disclosed payments.

Identity

payee name as filed, upper-cased, punctuation and corporate suffixes (LLC, Inc, Co…) stripped — a normalised string, not an identifier the PDC issues This profile merges 2 spellings of the payee name, merged by us; section 04 lists them.

Payments

PDC expenditure filings (tijg-9zyp), election years 2021–2026, summed per paying committee. Amounts as filed; subvendor pass-throughs appear under the reported payee.

Overlaps

the same-race overlap layer over the expenditure and independent-expenditure filings (67cp-h962), as of 2026-09-01. Gap in days is from the last candidate payment to the first independent expenditure; the window is WAC 390-05-210’s twelve months. A shared officer is named only where both committees’ registrations were read.

Retrieved

expenditures 2026-09-05 · independent expenditures 2026-09-05, from data.wa.gov, per the import log.