I took a quick look candidate donations limited to New Jersey, now I’ve moved nation wide. Lets see if the trends that were in New Jersey were typical of the whole nation or just Jersey. I restricted the data to just 2014 to make it a little more manageable. As always lets look at Dems verse Repubs.
Here we see the party breakdown, along with the elusive third party. If it wasn’t obvious already the de facto two party system completely eclipses all third party hopes. Dems and Repubs trump the cumulative third party total by a magnitude difference. Moreover Republicans candidates across the nation raise more money than their democratic counterparts. This caught me by surprise as I thought totals would lean a little democratic, but more or less even. Lets take a peak at the office breakdown.2014 was a big election year for the House, and a lesser year for the Senate. My prediction would put House campaign donations way ahead of the Senate.
Yup that looks about right. Not as big a spread as I would of guess, but this follows from the years context. One thing to note, with this dataset I kept all candidates, even if they lost. This should give a more complete look at ALL donations to candidates not just the ones that have been elected. So I wonder who raised more, the winners or the losers?
The above graph is misleading. You may want to say that people who won their elections raised more money, and you would be right if you looked at it cumulatively. However, to get anything meaningful out of this graph we need to look at per elected official. It could be that there are simply more candidates that won than lost, leading to the spread.
Now this is surprising, even per candidate the politicians who were elected raised almost 5 times that of those who lost. Out of the 1415 candidates, 936 of them lost, and 474 of them won. Only 3 withdrew and 2 were “unknown”. Finally, lets look at the industries again.
Here we see uncoded donations eclipsing the rest of the other industries per usual. As a reminder, Uncoded actually includes PAC donations as well as individual donations. This is why uncoded always comes in as the largest category.On a federal level it looks like New Jersey is pretty much in line with all the states. However, the whole point of getting data for every state is to be able to compare them. Stay tuned for part 4 MarcelloP.S. heres a preview