Party Contributions Part 2

In my last post, I reviewed contributions to the Iowa Democratic Party and the Republican Party of Iowa and found that both acted like bank accounts that re-distribute funds from candidates who bring in the most to targeted districts. This raised more questions than answers. If candidates are funding the parties, then who is funding the candidates?

Who funds the Candidates?

For this analysis, I pulled contributions to every active, registered republican and democratic statewide and legislative candidate. For each group, I excluded all contributions from their respective state parties (Because this money comes mostly from the candidates themselves, it would essentially count each contribution twice). I also excluded the gubernatorial candidates on both sides because they raised so much, it skewed the data on both sides. I will compare the gubernatorial candidates in a later post.

Here is a summary of individual contributions to candidates of both parties:

The result shows that at the very grassroots level, both parties are similar, bringing in 11-13% in small donor contributions. Democrats take in more money from large donor contributions and companies/entities. So let's take a look at those companies and entities.

Companies fund Republicans; Unions fund Democrats

A breakdown of the top 50 contributors to democrats and republicans shows that company PACs tend to contribute more to Republican candidates and labor union PACs tend to contribute more to Democrats.

Here's a list of the top 50 company/entity contributors to both parties:

It is interesting to consider the data listed above in the context of recent changes to Iowa's Collective Bargaining laws. There's sort of a chicken/egg scenario where it's unclear whether Republicans were targeting Iowa's workers because of the political threat posed by labor union contributions, or perhaps Iowa's unions reacted to Republican attacks by contributing to Democratic candidates. A more in-depth review will likely uncover more information, and I intend to do that in a later post.

Data Transparency

You may have noticed that the Iowa Democratic Party is listed as #3 for the Democrats above, and the Iowa Republican Party is listed as #19 for the Republicans above. I excluded every contribution from either party that was tied to the party's contributing committee code. The data reported above is the result of contributions being listed on both sides of the aisle without a contributing committee code. I think that's just an important reminder that the information here is only as accurate as the underlying data. This site pulls all data for companies/entities based on committee code numbers because those numbers are less prone to error than a misspelling in a committee name.

The tool on this page breaks down pie charts according to the following

1. Contributions from the committee code for the Republican Party of Iowa or the Iowa Democratic Party (State Party Contributions)
2. Contributions from any other entity with an organization name (Contributions from Companies/other Entities)
3. A total of all remaining contributions >$200
4. A total of all remaining contributions <$200

An important note is that the list of top individual donors aggregates totals regardless of whether the individual contribution was more or less than $200. So for a donor that contributed $50 and then later contributed $250 to a candidate, those contributions would be shown separately in the graph, but the total would be $300 in the name list below.

Next Steps

I've shown that candidates fund their state parties and that there is a disparity in the types of entities that contribute to candidates of different parties. But if company PACs tend to contribute to Republicans and union PACs tend to give to Democrats, then who is giving to those PACs? In my next posts, I plan to explore exactly that issue as well as an analysis of the campaign finances behind the 2018 Iowa gubernatorial election.