In my post yesterday (here) I began to make the argument that direct campaign contributions can be an indicator of a ground game or grassroots effort. Using data from OCPF (here) I looked at campaign contributions from 1/1/14 through 5/31/14. This post is a continuation of that thread (and I will reference it, so please read that one first – the charts are now working).
In yesterday’s post I looked at the trend of individual contributions. Today we are going to look at the source of those contributions. Using the same time period (1/1 through 5/31) I aggregate the contributions into 4 buckets: 1) In State 2) Out of State 3) Loans the Candidate made to their own campaign and 4) Unknown or Unitemized. Here are the results:
A couple of points jump out. 1st, Berwick and Kayyem are receiving more $ from outside the state than from within while Grossman and Coakley both receive approx a 4-1 ratio of in-state vs out-of-state. 2nd, you can see that self funding has been a significant percentage of total contributions for both Avellone and Kayyem.
We also looked at Facebook “likes” yesterday and I suggested that Kayyem had a good grasp on that crowd. So I wondered if the out of state contributions for Kayyem and Berwick were coming from political sites helping to raise revenue for the candidates. One way to look at this is the amount coming from ActBlue. While I don’t have those direct numbers, we can get an indication of the contributions from the fees charged by ActBlue to each campaign (the ActBlue website says it charges a flat 3.95% fee per contribution). I totaled up all the ActBlue fees over all campaigns and determined the percentage for each individual campaign. The next chart shows the breakdown.
Sure enough, Kayyem is the largest recipient of the ActBlue campaigns. What is quite interesting is that Berwick received almost no ActBlue contributions (again, based on fees paid back to ActBlue). So while Berwick is doing well out of state – it doesn’t appear to be because of political action sites on the web.
So where is the Berwick money coming from? I’m glad you asked. While he went to college in MA and has been here for a long time, he grew up in CT, so maybe there is a boost coming from CT? To answer this questions I looked at Berwick’s out of state contributions totaled by state. The next figure shows any state representing more than 2% of the total of out-of-state donations for the Berwick campaign.
Well, it’s not coming from CT but from California instead. And a quick glance through those CA contributions show that a significant portion are coming from folks in the medical fields. Not surprising considering Berwick’s profession and publication record in the health fields.
But CA is a big blue state, so maybe this isn’t anything special for Berwick? Let’s look at the recipient with the 2nd most out-of-state donations – Kayyem – and see where her donations are coming from. Like the chart above, this one represents all states that have contributed more than 2% of the total out-of-state direct funding:
While the different between CA and NY isn’t as dramatic with Kayyem, they are still #1 and #2. So let’s look at the 3rd highest recipient of out of state contributions:
Along with NY and CA, for Coakley we are also seeing other New England states.
Let’s not leave the Grossman campaign out. Here is what his chart looks like:
So what does all this mean? I’ll speculate that Coakley’s name recognition is benefiting her in New England. Berwick appears to have a better nationwide campaign going but he isn’t necessarily doing that through social media sites. Instead it is his medical background that has earned his reputation and is driving campaign contributions. This suggests that up until this point, the Berwick campaign has been on a single issue – healthcare. Whether he can break out of this and show that he is a broader candidate is yet to be seen (or whether he could win even as a single issue candidate, but recent material out of the Berwick campaign suggests he is trying to expand his base of support).
Now let’s take a closer look at the ActBlue numbers to figure out if Kayyem really has lost that status as internet favorite as I have speculated, This chart shows total fees for each candidate by month:
Sure enough, Kayyem appeared to be that internet favorite early on with the January number representing approx. $156K raised through ActBlue (or nearly her entire January contributions). This was cut to 1/3 in February and any advantage she had was gone by May. No one seemed to step up until May when Coakley jumped. Coakley’s May number represents about $83K raised through ActBlue (or 1/3 of her total May contributions). Kayyem injected $200K of her own money into her campaign on March 17th but it appears to have had no impact on helping her online fundraising efforts, If Coakley can capitalize on the momentum gained in May then we would expect her base to expand beyond New England.
Apologies to the Avellone campaign, but his numbers are so low that it doesn’t make sense to break them out individually. His in-state fundraising pales in comparison to the other 4 candidates and his out of state fundraising is practically non-existent.
–Kevin
I’d just note some caution on the Act Blue numbers. First, Act Blue does tell you exactly how much per candidate has been raised across all of Act Blue, (e.g., here is Berwick’s total, which is a little less than half of Kayyem’s), though it doesn’t break it down by time period. Second, I’m not sure how good a proxy Act Blue is at this point, because the candidates’ own websites are the easiest way to raise out-of-state money, and some of them (e.g., Berwick & Kayyem) are not “powered” by Act Blue.
ActBlue is a contribution processor for candidate campaigns directly. Coakley uses ActBlue to process all direct online campaign contributions on her website hence she is paying more in fees. Both Kayyem and Berwick use NGP VAN to process contributions on their website so they’d only pay ActBlue fees for contributions on third party sites.
Nevertheless, it is still odd that fees paid by Kayyem decreased so dramatically. Maybe she changed vendors from ActBlue to NGP VAN?