Hillary Has the Largest War Chest, but She’s Trailing Bernie in Donor Count
As a data-driven real estate startup, RentHop knows how much you care about your neighborhood as well as the amount of thought that goes into choosing one. What if you find out the political views of your Boston and Cambridge neighbors before you see them wearing your least favorite candidate’s shirt while waiting for the T? Well our data scientists crunched the data from FEC.gov on the Boston area’s campaign contributions, so you can do that!
Find your zip code, select/unselect candidates, and explore the city and suburbs
To create the map, we dove deeper into the nationwide data we used for our ‘Trump Map’. We started with the most recent national filing from February 20, 2016 direct from the FEC’s disclosure reports. These reports detail all documented individual contributions to candidates, over 1.17 million lines of contributions, totaling nearly $300 million for all candidates’ campaigns. We cleaned this data up a bit to make it more usable by 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 is important to note that data is not required to be collected about individuals that give less than $200 during the election cycle, but many will voluntarily offer it. Since this stipulation affects the data for each candidate, although not precisely evenly, we feel it is still statistically relevant for comparing the candidates to each other.
With the resulting data on 399,009 unique donors nationwide, we set out to see where in Massachusetts they are and whom they support. Candidates like Jeb Bush and Ben Carson collected significant amounts of money, but have since dropped out, so they have been grouped together with the rest of the former candidates. The interactive pie chart will always show candidates proportionate to each other, whether showing all or just the candidates you’ve selected.
Boston is split between the deep-pocketed and smaller donors
Overall, Hillary Clinton has dominated in the Boston area in terms of dollars raised, but trails Bernie Sanders in donors by about 20%. Having over triple the amount of money raised certainly doesn’t hurt, but it arguably is not better than more people having your back. Looking at the average donated per individual, we see some extraordinary amounts. Some of these numbers may look familiar, for Marco Rubio and John Kasich especially, as they aren’t far off from what many people write on their rent checks each month. Check out our Boston and Cambridge rental listings if you need to lower your rent because you sent it all to your favorite candidate!
On the GOP side, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio each received three to four times the number of donors as Kasich and Trump. While all candidates have their differences, it’s interesting to look at how they are similar. Cruz and Kasich have both raised very similar amounts despite the vast difference in number of donors. Cruz, Trump, and Sanders seem to be collecting from a similar income bracket, as each have collected a similar average amount per individual. That same parallel exists between Kasich and Rubio, as well as Clinton, who seem to all be reaching deep-pocketed individuals. Every candidate broke into six figure numbers exept for Trump, who scrounged up just $39,561, although he’s always quick to remind us that he doesn’t need our money.
Where are Boston’s top donors?
Boston’s most generous neighborhoods are also quite expensive and affluent, as one might expect. The Harvard area zip code of 02138 gave the most money of any with over 6% of the metro area’s aggregate total. This total was followed closely by the rather expenisve Back Bay neighborhood in 02216.
After looking at the city as a whole, we analyzed the individual candidates
We calculated where each has the strongest show of support based on percentage of donors supporting them and total dollars collected there. To prevent ending up with a list of zip codes where a candidate had the strongest showing of support with just a roomful of donors we looked only at areas with at least the median number of donors. The median donor count was 22 among all zip codes with at least one donor.
Hillary is the star at Ted Cruz’s Alma Mater
Most of Clinton’s dollar-weighted firepower comes from within key neighborhoods in Cambridge, Boston, and Brookline. The 02138 zipcode of Cambridge, which encompasses most of Harvard University and the surrounding area full of students, alums, faculty, and staff members. Interestingly, the neighboring 02139 which covers the MIT and Central Square area, does not appear at all in her top donor zip codes.
MIT votes (with their wallets) for Bernie
Sanders found the vast majority of his supporters among the university dominated regions. Like Clinton, the Harvard Square area gave him the most amount of dollars, but he also garnered strong support in neighboring 02139 at Central Square and MIT. In fact, among both GOP and Democratic candidates, Sanders dominated with a simple majority of 53% in that neighborhood.
Rubio Rounds up Support in these Neighborhoods
Rubio has a strong showing in Andover and North Andover, but his real strength lies in Swampscott’s 01907 neighborhood. He took over 50% of the dollars donated, but that number might come down in the next filing. Since there were only five unique contributors to his campaign living in Swampscott, and there’s a $2,700 limit on contributions from individuals, refunds will likely be issued. This shouldn’t be alarming, as contribution refunds are seen quite commonly in the raw FEC data.
A familiar, but not so welcome face around Cambridge
With just under $160,000 raised across the Boston area, it seems Ted Cruz hasn’t had a strong homecoming. Most of Cruz’s money in the metro area comes from outside of downtown Boston, with top towns ranging as far as North Reading, Concord, and North Andover. Watertown and Waltham are the only zip codes starting with “02”. However, with 462 unique donors, Cruz did receive fairly broad support in terms of raw count; they just on average gave less than supporters of Rubio and Kasich.
Boston wallets seem to say: “Who is this Donald Trump guy?”
The data on Trump is quite scattered and sparse. We see support in Lynnfield, Boxford, and Allston. However, at the scale of numbers reported, it would only take one married couple, each giving the regulatory maximum, to move the needle and suddenly become the focal point of Donald fans in the Boston area. Despite his low funds raised, he actually received more support in the Boston area than he did in Chicago and New York.
There’s certainly plenty of other interesting things to note, we encourage you to explore the map on your own and find something we missed!
If you’re in the market for a new apartment, or were just influenced to move because of this study, be sure to check out the extensive selection of Boston area apartments for rent.
RentHop, it’s like apartment hunting…but smarter.
Resources Used
“2016 Presidential Campaign Finance, Contributor Data Download, All Candidates”, FEC.gov, Pulled on February 24, 2016, http://fec.gov/disclosurep/PDownload.do.
“CartoDB Map Tiles”, www.CartoDB.com.
