The 2008 Presidential
Campaign Finance Analysis

or, the military votes Obama too!

By Jim Schrempp http://www.JimSchrempp.com

January 2009 – Obama 41, McCain 28

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...

-end-

Copyright © 2009

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) You can read more of Jim’s ramblings at http://www.JimSchrempp.com