Small donors bring diversity

A new report out today from Public Campaign, All Over the Map: Small Donors Bring Diversity to Arizona's Elections, authored by yours truly, gives a hint of why small donor involvement in politics could change the flavor of elections.

One of the big stories this election season is the growing clout of small donors, who are giving more to the Democratic presidential candidates, particularly Barack Obama, than ever before. We don't know much about these small donors other than what the presidential campaigns tell us. That's because candidates are not required to report the details on contributions of $200 or less as they do for larger contributions - names, addresses, and occupation-instead reporting them all in one lump sum.

In Arizona, however, candidates who run under the state's Clean Elections system qualify for public funding to run their races if they collect a set number of $5 contributions from Arizona residents. Once candidates collect their qualifying $5 contributions, they receive a grant to run their campaign, provided they agree to abide by strict spending limits and to raise no more private money. Details about these $5 contributors, including their addresses, are reported to the Arizona secretary of state.

In All Over the Map, we looked at the contributions from these small donors to Arizona's gubernatorial campaigns alongside contributions to privately funded campaigns. We then did a "mash up" of these data with U.S. Census demographic data. We found that the $5 donors were more diverse racially, ethnically, economically and geographically than the private donors were. The report includes many charts demonstrating the details of our findings-how, for example, Clean Elections candidates collected twice as much, proportionately, of their contributions from zip codes with the highest percentages of Hispanics than did privately funded candidates.

The old adage says that a picture is worth 1,000 words, and this map shows the stark difference between the $5 donors and big donors to private campaigns most sharply. Click on the blue points on the map, and you'll see a photo of the houses of $5 donors. Click on the green points, and the photo of big donors' homes pops up. Typically the houses of the $5 donors are modest, those of the big donors, well, less so.

This election season so far, Barack Obama's has collected 47 percent of his individual contributions-about $124 million-from people giving $200 or less, according to the Campaign Finance Institute. Hillary Clinton has collected a third of her cash from individuals, or about $66 million, from small donors. John McCain is more old school, getting 23 percent of his cash from these donors, or about $22 million. (George Bush collected 22 percent of his individual cash from small donors over the comparable time period.)

Of course the small donor phenomenon right now is restricted largely to the presidential race, which has the highest profile you can get. Big donors still dominate in most of the congressional races, which garner much less attention. A system of public financing at the national level, patterned on the system in Arizona, would systematize the Obama small donor phenomenon for all of these races.

Bookmark/Search this post with: