January 2009
Me: Hello, I'm Jim and I'm a dataholic. You: Hello Jim!
I admit it. I love large sets of data. I love them in a database. I love the feeling of a set of queries that suddenly reveals some nugget of information. I guess that's why I squirreled away the 35M AOL query string dataset when it came available. And that's what leads us on today's journey.
Shortly after the 2008 presidential election was over I was drawn to a site, there are actually several, that lets one search the records of presidential campaign contributions. For those of you who donated to a campaign, you'll remember that you had to provide your name, address, occupation, and employer. This is all required in the interests of fair and transparent election funding. The data is disclosed every so often and these sites aggregate it all. One can search by name, zip code, city, employer, etc. All of the sites restrict the searches in some way. I wanted more.
I awoke a few days later to the thought, "if that data is public, I must be able to order a copy. I wonder what it costs?" Half way through my java the answer was there: the data is free and you can download it. Yes!! Before I was out of the shower I had on my laptop 4M records, totaling a whopping $1.1B in campaign contributions. A few days later and I had it in a SQL database, ready for slicing and dicing. Here's what I've found so far.
1. Saratoga, CA has a reputation of being a Republican stronghold, and you certainly see that in voter registration numbers. But when it came to cash, we were big time Dems. There probably weren't any Ron Paul parties in town.
|
Contributions from 95070 (Saratoga, CA) |
|||
| $364,526 | Obama, Barack | ||
| 159,935 | Clinton, Hillary Rodham | ||
| 120,663 | McCain, John S | ||
| 34,865 | Romney, Mitt | ||
| 23,550 | Giuliani, Rudolph W | ||
| 13,423 | Edwards, John | ||
| 7,125 | Richardson, Bill | ||
| 3,600 | Biden, Joseph R Jr | ||
| 2,420 | Thompson, Fred Dalton | ||
| 2,035 | Tancredo, Thomas Gerald | ||
| 1,500 | Hunter, Duncan | ||
| 1,250 | Paul, Ron | ||
| 750 | Huckabee, Mike | ||
| 700 | Kucinich, Dennis J | ||
| 300 | Gravel, Mike | ||
| 250 | Dodd, Christopher J | ||
2. Google employees gave a lot. Ron Paul was surprisingly popular. John McCain was not.
| Contributions from Google employees | |||
| $851,466 | Obama, Barack | ||
| 82,095 | Clinton, Hillary Rodham | ||
| 55,924 | Paul, Ron | ||
| 22,830 | McCain, John S | ||
| 7,900 | Giuliani, Rudolph W | ||
| 6,465 | Edwards, John | ||
| 4,550 | Richardson, Bill | ||
| 2,400 | Kucinich, Dennis J | ||
| 2,300 | Brownback, Samuel Dale | ||
| 1,200 | Romney, Mitt | ||
| 900 | Huckabee, Mike | ||
| 500 | Thompson, Fred Dalton | ||
| 250 | Dodd, Christopher J | ||
3. I wondered about the military. How lopsided was their support for McCain? I started by looking for "army" in the employer category. This led me to find that the Department of Defense was often the employer. The query became quite complex - I loved it. I ended up finding all the entries that contained variants of DoD, Marine, Army, AirForce, and Navy. I then looked at all the distinct occupations in these employers. I searched again on all these occupations to find more distinct employers. After a few iterations I felt like I had all the military and DoD employees. The results were hard to believe:
DoD employees gave to Obama 44%, McCain 25%, Ron Paul 11%, Hillary
Clinton 9%.
I wondered if civilian DoD employees were skewing the mix. I went back and
tried to qualify just those who's occupation looked like active duty
military. Occupations like Officer, Soldier, Military, Naval Officer,
Infantry Officer, Lieutenant Colonel, US Marine, etc. I excluded
contributors from the National Guard and the Coast Guard. It's not easy to
do this kind of classification, so I just did my best. The results were
striking:
|
Active Duty Military Contributions |
 |
|||
|
Total Contrib |
Number of Contributions |
|||
| $405,446 | 4,128 | Obama, Barack | ||
| 274,397 | 1,275 | McCain, John S | ||
| 146,750 | 692 | Paul, Ron | ||
| 64,183 | 510 | Clinton, Hillary | ||
| 44,074 | 182 | Huckabee, Mike | ||
| 23,025 | 103 | Thompson, Fred | ||
| 16,793 | 85 | Romney, Mitt | ||
| The rest received under $10k each | ||||
Looking at all the DoD employees that I did not group as active-duty we see
that they put Hillary and Ron Paul in a tie for 3rd, while the active duty
military favored Ron over Hillary by a significant margin.
|
All Non Active Duty DoD Employee Contributions |
|||||
| Total Contrib | Number of Contributions | ||||
| $653,005 | 5,693 | Obama, Barack | |||
| 328,877 | 1,498 | McCain, John S | |||
| 159,726 | 1,012 | Clinton, Hillary Rodham | |||
| 126,894 | 762 | Paul, Ron | |||
| 28,999 | 126 | Romney, Mitt | |||
| 27,415 | 141 | Huckabee, Mike | |||
| 22,498 | 100 | Thompson, Fred Dalton | |||
| 15,705 | 57 | Giuliani, Rudolph W | |||
| 13,572 | 140 | Edwards, John | |||
| The rest received under $10k each | |||||
Friends have suggested I do the analysis on retired military and veterans.
Maybe I'll find support for John McCain there - I certainly didn't see it in
the actively serving.
4. I want to do more analysis on corporations. Who did Hughes favor? Halliburton? General Dynamics?
Do you have a question that this data might answer? Send me an email...
Jim Schrempp is a sometimes freelance writer (only Vanity Press will publish his work) living in Saratoga, California. His writings have appeared on numerous pages on his own web site. The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of anyone else (although Jim wishes more people shared his opinions)