Manhattan Lost Millions on Some Not-So-Promising Candidates
No one wants to waste money donating to a failed political campaign. However, with over a dozen presidential candidates only 9 short months ago, there are bound to be many losers in the field. As the debates, campaigns, and negative ads rage across swing states everywhere, more and more potential delegates commit, and more and more hopefuls drop out of the race. We previously studied neighborhoods donating to the most successful campaigns. Today, we turn our attention at New York’s biggest losers. Which ZIP Codes wasted the most money on now doomed presidential candidates? Using data from the FEC disclosure reports, we map out the parts of NYC with the best and worst predictive power on campaign success.
Find your ZIP Code on the map below to see how your neighborhood fared and who the biggest loser was.
Compare the Campaign’s Biggest Losers and Wasters
To create the map, we took the FEC’s disclosure reports detailing individual contributions to candidates. The data from most recent national filing on April 22, 2016, detailed over 2.5 million documented contributions, totaling over $700 million for all candidates’ campaigns. To make this data more usable, we cleaned it up a bit first, grouping together line items from people with the same name, from the same zip code and with the same occupation, effectively removing duplicated entries for the same person. It’s important to note that data is not required to be collected about individuals that give less than $200 during the entire election cycle. This can mean that donors who previously contributed are only now breaking that $200 threshold and becoming documented, while others may not be documented at all.
Must be Something in the Upper East Side Water…
In general, residents of Midtown Manhattan and Upper East Side were very unlucky with their donation choices. ZIP Code 10065, which spans 59th to 72nd street east of Central Park, donated a majority of their money to Republican candidates not named Trump. The top three wasters include $229,000 reported donations to Bush, $94,000 to Rubio, $57,000 to Christie, with the remaining money split between Cruz, Kasich, and others. ZIP Code 10023, the counterparts on the other side of Central Park near Lincoln Center in Upper West Side, donated a larger percent to Sanders and Clinton and hence rank much better on our wasted donations map. However, the neighborhood still squandered about $400,000 on now-defunct campaigns, split mostly between Rubio and Bush. Midtown East is particularly tragic, with both a high amount of absolute dollars and percentage dollars lost. ZIP Codes 10022 and 10017 combined spent nearly $1 million dollars with a fairly even distribution among the candidates (again, with Bush and Rubio slightly more than the others).
Moving downtown, there are generally a higher concentration of donors supporting Democrats, and hence less money wasted (for now). Chelsea in particular has a large amount of donation money going to Clinton and Sanders, and only a tiny percent going to dropped-out candidates. In fact, Cruz, Kasich, Bush, Rubio, and Christie combined received less than $160,000 in reported donations here! However, further downtown neighborhoods were less fortunate. ZIP Code 10282 along the northern tip of Battery Park City was the Ted Cruz stronghold in Manhattan donations, and ZIP Code 10004 on the southern tip of Financial District was similar to Midtown in showing strong Bush and Rubio support.
Manhattan Picks Some Losers – Brooklyn Spends More Wisely
It’s no secret that Manhattanites spend big, whether it be on apartment rents, dinners, parking garages or failed presidential campaigns. The people of Manhattan actually wasted more than the rest of NYC gave in total. Not to say that the Bronx and Staten Island was immune to squandering some cash too, but their 32% and 26% (respectively) amounts to a tiny fraction of what Manhattan flushed away so far this campaign season.
Looking back to the map we can see that the outer boroughs are, on the whole, far better at picking winners. Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, Woodside, and Astoria all spent very little of their donation money giving to former GOP candidates. The few exceptions are ZIP Code 11213 in Eastern Parkway and ZIP Code 11373 in Elmhurst, both showing strong Rubio support. Further south towards the end of the B/D subway lines, we find more supporters of Chris Christie and Ben Carson near Borough Park, Bensonhurst, and Coney Island. Far north in Riverdale and Van Courtlandt Park, we see ZIP Code 10463 and 10471 donating mostly to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Jeb Sucked up a Ton of Cash – Dropped out Early
The breakdown of whom received GOP campaign cash says something about New York’s choice of candidates, and it’s nothing particularly positive. The top 3 money pits all dropped out about two months before the John Kasich and Ted Cruz conceded to Donald Trump. While this is many, many month’s rent for anyone living in or out of New York, it’s still far less than has been given to Hillary and Bernie.
Check out our head to head of the last two fighters in the race for the nomination.
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Resources Used
“2016 Presidential Campaign Finance, Contributor Data Download, All Candidates”, FEC.gov, Pulled on May 9, 2016, http://fec.gov/disclosurep/PDownload.do.
