A quick refresher for those just joining us. I took campaign donation data from followthemoney.org. This website makes campaign donations very easy to parse and work with. I gathered the data for all campaign donation to either Senators or Congressmen regardless of whether they were elected or not. With this data I was able to see patterns with regards to political parties, candidate’s office, and others. In this part we will take a look how each state compares to each other. First lets take a look at overall donations for 2014.
Don’t try to pull too many grand conclusions from the above graph. Like I mentioned when talking about winners and losers in elections, donations per candidate (or here per capita) give more insight. The above graph shows what is basically a population map. The more populated state show up in a darker green than the less populated states. This poses an unfair advantages for states like California and New York. People in less populated states have to donate more per person than people in higher populated states. So in order to get a fairer comparison we need to normalize our donations. I have calculated donations per capita for each state.
That’s much better. As you can see the maps are wildly different and does not resemble a population map in any way. States like NY, NJ, MA, and CA are no longer top tier, but rather toward the bottom. Interestingly enough, states that have less people in them seem to have much greater donations per person, Alaska is a notable example. Why do these states get way more contributions than others? One possible explanation are that some of theses states are swing states. Swing states (like New Hampshire above) are very closely divided between the Republicans and the Democrats. These states should naturally garnish more donations as the races should be more exciting and volatile. Speaking of parties which states gave more to the Democrats and which gave more to the Republicans.
Nothing too surprising here. Most republican states have more donations toward republican candidates and the same for democratic states. However, there are a few confused states. Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico are generally considered republican states, but the Democrats raised a lot more money. The opposite goes for Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania typical Democratic states. This map reinforces some geographical trends. The northeast coast and west coast are usual democratic strongholds.
A quick word on the interactive graphs above. These graphs were made using plotly and python. Plotly makes it very easy to make d3.js type graphs and interactive web apps. Recently plotly went open source which is great news for all of us. If you are looking to quickly make interactive graphs plotly should be your first stop (unless you are really good with d3). This ends the exploratory portion of Follow The Money, next up is the final report. Enjoy the interactive maps!-Marcello