Last part we took a look at campaign donations to New Jersey State legislatures. Now we are moving on up to the US House and Senate. The stakes are a little higher, the politicians have more power, and hopefully full of campaign donations. Luckily for me we have Followthemoney.org on our side.
All data collected for the following graphs was using followthemoney.org’s API. This made it easy to tabulate and graph all the recorded donations. First up is Democrats Vs Republicans.
Follows state legislature pretty closely. Democrats stomp republicans in terms of donations, however, this may be due to our data source rather than reality. 2014 and 2010 show close donation totals, while 2012 shows a blowout. 2013 seems to be completely missing republican data. That or only Democrats won.One important qualification to make on this data set is that it only represents donations to candidates who won their elections. We need context for 2013 as it is an off year election there must be some special circumstance. Luckily wikipedia is here to help out. Apparently during this time, sadly a senator passed away and a special election was held. As we suspected, a democratic candidate won. This may have contributed to the lopsided data. Now lets see if office maters at all.
Depending on the year it looks like office matters quite a bit. The special Senate election in 2013 influenced all campaign spending that year. 2010 was similar to 2013, but completely dominated by House campaign donations. As you probably know, house seats are up every 2 years. In the data above, house donations are all in the same range except in 2013, where there is no election. Senate elections on the other hand are every 2 years, but only 1/3 of the seats are up. New Jersey Senators were up for reelection in both 2012 and 2014 but not in 2010, explaining the lack of donations. Finally lets look at industry donations in 2012.
Here we see uncoded donations eclipsing the rest of the other industries. After seeing uncoded in part 1 I investigated. Uncoded actually includes a PAC donations as well as individual donations. This is why uncoded always comes in as the largest category. I did some quick calculations to see what % was from individuals like you and me and what % came from corporations and other PACs.
| Individual | $ 14,760,750.00 |
| Non-Individual | $ 1,412,439.00 |
| Grand Total | $ 16,173,189.00 |
Overwhelmingly the donations stemmed from Individuals. That is super surprising for me. There’s a lot more visualizations I can do with this data, but before that, we have to go nationwide.
-Marcellofind the data here:NJfedDon