Packages Used

Package Explanation for Use
Tidyverse It’s the tidiest, yo!
Lubridate Lubridate was used for the purpose of converting the date into a maleable form.
DT This package was used to create sortable datatables.
Knitr This package was primarily used for its kable function to create summary tables.
Scales Scales was used to create certain parameters on graphs, like dollar signs.

The Data

The data table below contains information on who made a donation to a political group. The information shows what amount was donated, when it was donated, the affiliated party of the group and at what level of office the political group is vying for.

Variables of Concern

The following variables are the variables the analysis will primarily put its attention towards.

Variable Purpose
Contributor Employer Certain employers have shown a tendency to have employees with specific views. This category will be used to define certain groups and their contribution tendencies.
Contributor Occupation Like the employer, some types of occupations also group themselves together to represent a specific group. This can also be the case for those that are unemployed or retired. We will explore some of these tendencies.
Receipt Amount This category provides a numeric value to how much a group values the cause they are contributing towards.
Committee Type This category helps identify at what political level an individual is contributing towards.
Party Affiliation This category identifies what specific party the contributions are being made towards.

Who is Getting Contributions?

It is important to see who is getting the most contributions. Whether it be a political party, a certain office, or just a qualified position, certain groups will receive different numbers of contributions. The following is an analysis of the number of contributions, not total money received.

Political Party

People tend to associate themselves with a particular political party. The following shows how many positive contributions were made to each political party.

Party Affiliation Contributions Made
DEMOCRATIC PARTY 39009
REPUBLICAN PARTY 17586
LIBERTARIAN PARTY 82
INDEPENDENT 77
DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR 59
GREEN PARTY 31

The table above shows how the democratic party clearly dominates the positive contributions. However, it may be interesting to see how many refunds or negative contributions each party has handled.

Party Affiliation Contributions Refunded
REPUBLICAN PARTY 252
DEMOCRATIC PARTY 248
DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR 1

Although there aren’t many instances where there are refunds or negative contributions, the republican and democratic parties have handled the most refunds, most likely a result of having the greatest number of contributions. But which organizations have given out the most refunds within these parties? The Donald Trump for President organization accounted for the most refunds of any of the committee groups with just under 140. However, the Sittenfeld for Senate committee had the largest sum of contributions refunded at over $160,000, $60,000 more than any other organization. Any organizations with less than 5 contributions refunded were left off of this list.

Committee Name Contributions Refunded Total Contributions Refunded
DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, INC. 139 -17696.94
SITTENFELD FOR SENATE 77 -160100.00
FRIENDS OF SHERROD BROWN 61 -95926.13
AFTAB FOR OHIO 42 -99200.00
CITIZENS FOR JOSH MANDEL INC 38 -81000.00
DCCC 19 -6116.00
OHIO DEMOCRATIC PARTY 19 -18601.52
MARCO RUBIO FOR PRESIDENT 16 -19400.00
HILLARY FOR AMERICA 11 -3655.15
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE 10 -33939.50
TEAM GRAHAM, INC. 6 -13600.00

Qualified or Non-Qualified

Certain positions that candidates run for have the classification of qualified or non-qualified. Qualified positions have a significantly greater number of contributions than non-qualified.

Qualified? Contributions Made
Qualified 56398
Non-Qualified 446

Committee Type

Surprisingly, the group that received the most number of contributions was the political party itself. Unsurprisingly, the presidential campaigns received the next most contributions.

Committee Contributions
Party 18139
Presidential 16232
Senate 11280
House 9928
PAC 1265

Monetary Contributions

When examining contributions, the money involved is another important aspect to consider. Depending on certain times of year, the office being elected, and the party involved directly influences how much money is contributed.

Contributions by Committee Over Time

The contributions for certain committees, unsurprisingly, change depending on the upcoming election. For example, seeing greaters amounts of contributions to the presidential office is not surprising as the presidential election gets closer. However, the amount contributed to certain offices over time is shocking. The House representatives receives an unexpected $35 million per month by the final months of the election. The graph below breaks down the contributions in further detail.

Election Cycle Money Raised

Contributions by Office

The graph below shows how much each office received in contributions overall from 2015 through September of 2019. The House shows a surprising amount of contributions as the Presidential election seems to get the most attention.

Top Cincinnati Donaters

This data table details the top 1% of donors to political efforts. Individuals have been grouped by their last name and first name to figure out which individuals have donated the most money.

Although there are quite a few different names there that show significant contributions, the contributions by family show very interesting results. The Castellini’s, it appears, have a signficant influence on the city of Cincinnati.

In this table, we have gone ahead and grouped each family by party donations to determine who donated the most based on party affiliation. This gives us a better idea of each family’s political standing. Although common last names may have some influence on the amount of money represented, it doesn’t appear to have impacted the results too significantly.

Representation of Employers

Employer Representation

Certain employers have a much wealthier base than others. As a result, some have more representation when it comes to political contributions by their employees. The following shows how much money from employees was donated. Retirees and the unemployed have been filtered out since they do not have an employer.

To much surprise, those that are self-employed had the greatest representation within employer contributions. However, in the table below, we see which employer contributes the most per employee.

Interestingly, the representation of employers changed quite significantly when looking at average donations. This could have been a result of only a few large contributions by their employees. However, when you filter out the employers that had more than 10 contributions, it eliminates some of the bias found in just a couple donations.

Xavier University Contributions

In this section, we will be observing how Xavier University employees donated to politicals causes. This first portion shows a summary of how employees donated. The first table shows how many individual contributions employees made and how much each contribution was valued at.

Contributions Made Total Contribution
148 10574.47

The following bar graph helps to summarize how employees donated by party. The bar graphs are also stacked based on their role at Xavier. This is a representation of the total money contributed.

Some employees have donated much more than others. The table below shows each of the individuals that have made contributions. Despite there being 148 listed contributions from Xavier employees, only 21 have actually made contributions. Although the table below represents 22, George Traub made contributions under two different names. It doesn’t really affect his overall positioning of top donors from Xavier as his total comes out to $855, still third most of Xavier employees.

University of Cincinnati

The University of Cincinnati is the other large university within Cincinnati. Here, we will eb providing the same data shown in the Xavier data, but based on UC employees. Unsurprisingly, the number of contributions made by UC will be much greater as their university size is much greater than that of Xavier.

Contributions Made Total Contribution
1369 164069.3

The graph below shows how UC staff contributed to different parties. Unlike the Xavier graph, which was stacked based on occupation at the university, this graph has not been stacked because of the number of different occupations listed for UC employees. Nonetheless, like Xavier, UC employees have still contributed primarily to committees with Democratic affiliation.

The below datatable shows the employees that have contributed and has sorted them based on the total amount they have contributed to political causes.

Republican vs. Democratic

The two most notable and visible political parties are the Republican and Democratic parties. They each appeal to very specific groups of people and receive the most support of any political party. In the following analysis, I look at different aspects that make up each party and the contributions each party receives.

Retirees and The Unemployed

When first deciding on this type of analysis, I believed that the democratic party would receive the most contributions from those that are unemployed/retired. The Democratic Party has a tendancy to appeal to the groups that would like to receive public funding. Unsurprisingly, the contributions from the unemployed heavily favored the democrats. What was surprising, however, was how even the contributions from the retired were for each of the parties.

The next question I had was how this group of people contributed to each committee type, like President or Senate. Interesting, direct contributions to the party itself was the most popular among the unemployed and retirees. It is consistent with the results we found with the committee types overall, however, the contributions towards the parties themselves is significantly proportionally higher than of the entire population.

Timing of Contributions

As we had seen before, a significant number of contributions were made closer to the end of election cycles in November. During other parts of the year, contributions are steady, but do see some rise. However, the democratic party sees the most significant rise in contributions during the end of the cycle compared to the Republicans.

The committee types for the democratic party can really define where their contributions are being put towards. When looking at the above graph, I decided to reproduce the graph filtered with democrats only and stacking the bars based on the committee type. This will show what types of committees were most important to the party, especially late in the elections. The graph below shows how the democrats found two committees especially important.

Towards the end of the first election cycle, a significant number of contributions went towards presidential candidates. As soon as the election concluded, the contributions towards the presidential election subsided for the democrats and the focus became the house. These contributions continued to rise until the end of the second election cycle concluded. During this time period, contributions towards the senate and party remained constant and consistent. Each would see some spikes towards the end of an election, but after the election cycle would conclude, contributions returned to a relatively normal rate.

Top Contributors (Republican)

The type of contributors to each of the parties can be expected to be very different. In order to represent this, the datatable below shows the top contributions for republicans by occupation type, retirees and unemployed not included. The table shows that some of the high level occupations, like CEOs and chairmen, make the highest contributions. However, the surprising top contributor was homemakers. Homemakers accounted for over $1 million in total contributions to the Republican Party.

When you look at the Average contributions, however, homemakers fall to seventh while stockbrokers donate the most per contribution at nearly $20,000.

Since Homemakers and Stockbrokers and Homemakers produced the highest total contribution and highest average contribution, I decided to take a look at each of the individual contributions within these categories to see if there is one particular individual that may be making these numbers as high as they are. Interestingly, many of the homemakers are some of the wealthiest and well-known people in Cincinnati like the Lindner’s and Castellini’s. It would be interesting to see what the occupation Homemaker was actually meant to represent as it does not appear to represent people that make homes.

Top Contributors (Democrats)

Unlike the Republicans in the previous tab, the democrats have a very different demographic of contributions. Attorneys make up a significant portion of the contributions at over $900,000. Attorneys typically have high salaries, so this stat comes as no surprise. What was surprising, however, was Volunteer’s having the highest average contributions among all of the occupations. Like the Republicans, seeing the individual contributions will be helpful in seeing how Volunteers made as large of an average as they did.

To no surprise, a couple of huge contributors made a large portion of the donations by volunteers. Frances Pepper and Jennie Berliant contributed over $60,000 of the $72,000 donated by volunteers. These two individuals were the only two of the volunteers to make the top 10 contributors among the attorneys and volunteers.