Who Gives? (II)

It appears that the Franc data on how working-class donors favor the GOP was drawn - appropriately enough - from Arianna Huffington's Fundrace 2008 page.

Update: Frequent commenter DivGuy writes:

Franc's analysis of 2008 presidential donors is fatally flawed because the FEC only requires the disclosure of personal information for donors who give more than $200. You can see this quite easily by searching the site for any name or city, and you'll find that all are people who gave in excess of $200.

Barack Obama has received at least 80% of his donations (43% of his total funds raised) from small donors who gave less than $200 and who are not listed in the FEC database, or on the HuffPo site that uses the FEC data.

For instance, Franc said that Republicans had more contributions from waitresses. If you search for "waitress", you'll only see 30 donors - that's obviously far too few, and should have tipped Franc off to the incomplete nature of the data ... Not only that, but of the 14 waitresses who gave to Republicans, 13 gave to Ron Paul.

Comments

For the 2008 election cycle, the HuffPo site has no data on donors who gave $200 or less.

It's useless for the analysis that Franc pretended to do.

Posted by DivGuy | May 8, 2008 7:39 PM

Ross,

Will you reject and denounce? Franc's analysis is fatally flawed, and ultimately meaningless.

Posted by DivGuy | May 8, 2008 7:47 PM

Fun bit: Remember how Franc said that the Republicans had won waitresses?

1) There are just 30 of them. This should have been a sign that he was working with incomplete data.

2) Of the 14 waitresses who contributed to Republicans, 13 contributed to Ron Paul.

Here's the breakdown by candidate:

13 Paul
10 Obama
5 Clinton
1 Richardson
1 Huckabee

Posted by DivGuy | May 8, 2008 7:55 PM

Why should the metric be dollars given rather than number of contributors? In all the examples on the Huffington Post site that I've seen, there were *more contributors* to the Democrats in these categories (waitress, electrician) even where more money was given to Republicans.

Given that the inference is that more downscale voters favor Republicans, it seems to me that you should count donors rather than tally donations.

Posted by KFM | May 8, 2008 8:51 PM

Here's another flaw: The Fundrace totals include the 2004 cycle.

Posted by Other Ezra | May 9, 2008 9:54 AM

Good work, DivGuy, now I'm on board.

I did a few searches using the Huffpost site, and found it pretty interesting, however useful it may or may not be.

I still think a conclusion might be drawn from Franc's data, simply because I still wouldn't expect donors giving more than $200 to break out as they do. (Overall, that is. I'm not referring to the waitress data.)

The voters giving less than $200, on the other hand, are doing exactly what I would expect.

So ultimately, I'd like to see what Franc says based on the objections you raised. The big shots, who are certainly in the Huffpost database, are doing one thing, and the "lower" classes within the database go another way. To what extent are the CEOs and professionals rent-seeking, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out, and to what extent does the data still validate the party of Sam's Club? I dunno.

Posted by Ferrell | May 9, 2008 10:14 AM

And where's James on this? James? James??

Posted by ed | May 9, 2008 11:05 AM

This is an interesting discussion, but I don't think I really understand the meaning of the Sam's Club reference in the original post. I gather it has something to do with the Sam's Club demographic, but what exactly is that?

Posted by Psittakos | May 9, 2008 2:01 PM

Well, in my zip code, 94923 the data shows two donors who gave less than $200.

Posted by The North Coast Curmudgeon | May 9, 2008 2:10 PM

DivGuy, it gets even more fun. What about waiters? There are 51 of them in the database: 36 who gave to Democrats and 15 who gave to Republicans. And then there are 75 servers - 44 Democratic donors and 31 Republican donors - who almost all seem to be restaurant workers, based on their employers. Add up the 3 categories, and Democrats have 60% more donors than Republicans (96-60) and 52% more money ($47k-$31k) - and that's leaving Ron Paul in with the Republicans.

I went through the list of other blue-collar occupations, and the same sort of result keeps coming up. For instance, there are 25 people listed with an occupation of "teamster," "steelworker," "bricklayer," or "autoworker." 10 are Ron Paul donors who gave $12,066, 4 are other GOP donors who gave $1,496, and 11 are Democratic donors who gave $4,585.

Posted by Dan | May 9, 2008 3:40 PM

Okay, one more. Here's the secretarial data.

"Secretary" R: $187,616 from 187 donors, D: $155,976 from 252 donors
"Receptionist" R: $21,648 from 31 donors, D: $38,641 from 72 donors
"Administrative Assistant" R: $106,975 from 116 donors, D: $153,184 from 283 donors
"Office Assistant" R: $22,030 from 24 donors, D: $29,157 from 35 donors

total: R: $338,269 from 358 donors, D: $376,958 from 642 donors

Posted by Dan | May 9, 2008 3:51 PM

The preponderance of Ron Paul donors among this data - midsized givers, mainly, a few hundred here or there - is maybe the most striking thing.

I would submit that it's evidence that even in relatively low-paying blue- and pink-collar professions, it's possible to store up significant discretionary funds if you live in your grandma's basement.

Posted by DivGuy | May 9, 2008 6:47 PM