Cincinnati Political Contributions

The purpose of this analysis is to attain a better understanding of the political climate in the Cincinnati region from 2015 to the present day using data downloaded from the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Federal Election Commission (FEC) Data:

The FEC data downloaded is a subset of al Cincinnati data from 2015 - present. Due to size restrictions, the subset includes only contributions where a political party is affiliated with the committee receiving the contribution and excludes all non-affiliated super PAC committees.

Analysis Goals

The goal of this analysis is provide visual aids, data tables, and written support for the political contribution trends affecting type of political contributor, political parties, and political office campaigns.

Data Preparation

Minor data replacements for the following employers were included to attribute obvious names containing major employers to a common company name for: University of Cincinnati, Procter & Gamble, and American Financial Group. In addition, minor data replacements for the following occupations were included in order to group obvious categories for: Retired, Self-Employed, Unknown, and Unemployed. The date format has been adjusted which was originally input in the format of d/m/y to m/d/y.

Data Table

The data table below is prepared to give an interactive display for the clean data used in the analysis below. The data fields selected will give an informative, yet summarized version of political contributions for the years 2015 to present, showing net contributions for each year by category type including all combination of unique fields provided.

4.1 Visualization: Illustrate how the amount contributed has varied over time from 2015 to present.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how the total political contributions have varied each year from 2015 to present with dramatic increases in major election years.

4.2 Visualization: Compare the amount of money each party raised for the two most recent election cycles (2015-2016;2017-2018).

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have varied for the two most recent election cycles by political party with the vast major of funds contributed to the Democratic and Republican parties and in this view an insignificant portion contributed to other parties. Please see chart below for additional analysis on contributions to these other parties.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have varied for the two major political parties, with the Democratic Party receiving similar contributions and a slight decrease in the amount contributed to the Republican party.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have varied for other political parties during the past two election cycles.

4.3 Visualization: Illustrate the association between the amount contributed and the committee type.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have varied for each of the committee types in the past two election cycles.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have varied for each of the committee types in the past two election cycles, further illustrating a significantly higher contribution to the general party.

5.1 Visualization: Which Cincinnati residents spend the most money on politics and where does it go?

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have been provided to the two major political parties in total from 2015 - 2018, with a slight edge to the Republican Party.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have been provided to the two major political parties from 2015 - 2018, the Republican Party typically collects more contributions, but this trend was reversed in 2018.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have been provided to the two major political parties from 2015 - 2018, the Republican Party contributes more to the general party, but the Democratic Party contributes more to Senate and Presidential races.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have been provided to the Republican Party from 2015 - 2018, the Republican Party contributes more to the general party during election years, but has consistent contributions in races.

Description:

The bar chart below displays how political contributions have been provided to the Democratic Party from 2015 - 2018, the Democratic Party contributes more to the general party during election years, but has seen a dramatic increase in contributions in Presidential election years and the 2018 House races.

5.2 Visualization: Who make the most individual contributions and why do you think that is?

Description:

The bar chart below displays the top 10 political family contributors during 2015 - 2018. The data was gathered by collecting information by the contributor last name and committee party affiliation. The list many of those who have major business connections to the City of Cincinnati.

5.3 Visualization: Which employers are most heavily represented in the data?

Description:

The bar chart below displays the top 5 contributors based on employer during 2015 - 2018. The data was gathered by collecting information by the contributor employer, but excluding any categories that are not related to specific companies (i.e self-employed, retired, unemployed, homemaker, etc.). A list of the largest employers appears to mirror the list of contributing individuals.

5.4a Visualization: How many individuals who work for Xavier have made at least one contribution?

Description:

The count below has been set up to include the amount of unique last names employed by Xavier who have at least one political contribution in the years 2015 - 2018. There are 20 Xavier employees who have contributed.

## # A tibble: 1 x 2
##   contributor_employer count
##   <chr>                <int>
## 1 XAVIER UNIVERSITY       20

5.4b Visualization: How much money in total have Xavier University employees contributed?

Description:

The bar chart below displays the total amount contributed by Xavier employees.

5.4c Visualization: Which Xavier employees have contributed the most?

Description:

The bar chart below displays the top 10 individuals who worked for Xavier University in the years from 2015 - 2018.

6.1 Visualization: Compare contributions to refunds

Description:

The bar chart below displays contribution in relation to refunds, there are a higher amount of refunds in the first quarter of the year. Additional analysis is required to determine if this trend occurs each year.

Description:

The bar chart below displays contribution in relation to refunds for each year. There appears to have a higher amount of refunds in the first quarter for the majority of the years, but a significant portion of that is in the most recent year of 2018.

6.2 Visualization: Contributions by Contributor Type

Description:

For this analysis I wanted to see how the total amounts contributed were spread out by size of the contribution and to get a better understanding of how the big contributors compare to small contributors.

For this analysis I will need to create three groups based on their annual contributions. These groups will consist of large (contributing over 50k in a year), medium (contributing between 10k - 50k in a year), and small (contributing under 10k in a year).

The bar chart below displays total amounts contributed during the period of 2015 - 2018. There are no surprises here as it is expected that smaller contributions make up a larger total amount. Further analysis is needed to determine how many contributing units there are for each category.

Description:

For this analysis I am breaking down the groups into amounts contributed based on last name and returning the number count of contributions during the period of 2015 - 2018.

The bar chart below displays total number of contributions during the period of 2015 - 2018. Again, there are no surprises here as it is expected that there would be a larger number of smaller contributions. However, it is interesting to see the actual volume of smaller contributors in relation to both medium and large contributors.

Description:

For this analysis I am showing a boxplot to show the range of contributions and how they relate to each other.

The boxplot chart below shows the large variation in the medians between the three categories of contributors based on size. The analysis performed shows that a political party or candidate interested in drumming up some contributions would have a better chance of generating significant contributions by targeting and soliciting indivudal contributions from known political party loyalists, the alternative would be to expend a large effort or capitalize on popularity from the smaller contributors.