Cincinnati Political Donations Analysis

This is a dataset that comprises of political donor donations in the city of Cincinnati from 2015-2018. The data includes information about contributors’ demographic infomration, donation details, and the political committee that received the donation. I will be analyzing the donor trends for Cincinnati residents by breaking down their political party and employer.

I will be using R Studio and the tidyverse, dplyr, and ggplot2 packages.

The data is hosted here:https://myxavier-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/largentm_xavier_edu/EfFRsW9hwq5Bg732pnvA2sABdlJGZY5AWGOVEv5o-X7pAA?download=1.

Wrangling and Summary

First, I identified the rows with missing columns and removed them from the data. There were about 2,800 missing data points in the table, so I removed them. This reduced our data from 57,375 donations to 55,837 donations. Donations with missing data points consisted of 2.7% of the population. The following shows the exact number of missing values along with their respective columns.

## [1] 2795
##       contributor_last_name      contributor_first_name 
##                           6                           0 
##        contributor_street_1        contributor_employer 
##                          17                        1430 
##      contributor_occupation   contribution_receipt_date 
##                        1342                           0 
## contribution_receipt_amount   contributor_aggregate_ytd 
##                           0                           0 
##              committee_name              committee_type 
##                           0                           0 
## committee_party_affiliation 
##                           0

Additionally, I renamed some of the column names for convenience sake. For instance, I renamed “contributor_first_name” to just “first_name”.

Moreover, I simply combined all third parties into one group called “Third Party”. I also merged contributors identifying with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party with simply the Democratic Party.

Lastly, I fixed employer errors and abbreviations. For example, many misspelled “Procter & Gamble”, or they abbreviated it as “P&G”. Other people also wrote down “Self Employed” instead of “Self-Employed”.

The following displays the summary statistics for all Cincinnati political donations. The highest donation sent was at $66,100 and the highest refund was at $30,700 dollars. The average donation sent was $354.10, and the median was $50. Because of the massive discrepancy between the mean and median, the data for donation amounts are skewed to the right.

##     Min.  1st Qu.   Median     Mean  3rd Qu.     Max. 
## -30700.0     20.0     50.0    354.1    200.0  66100.0

Directed Analysis

Heavily Represented Employers

To determine political trends in Cincinnati, it’s critical to find out which employers are most common on the donor list. The following lists the top 15 employers. Being self-employed was the most common employer at 5,069 separate donations, and UC came in 2nd with 1,418 separate donations. Homemaker, P&G, and Cincinnati Children’s were the next significant employers.

## # A tibble: 15 x 2
##    employer                              n
##    <chr>                             <int>
##  1 NOT EMPLOYED                      10900
##  2 RETIRED                            9183
##  3 N/A                                7760
##  4 SELF-EMPLOYED                      5069
##  5 UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI           1418
##  6 HOMEMAKER                           482
##  7 PROCTER & GAMBLE                    476
##  8 CINCINNATI CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL      400
##  9 XAVIER UNIVERSITY                   150
## 10 TRIHEALTH                           134
## 11 TSC                                 128
## 12 THE SALVATION ARMY                  117
## 13 GE AVIATION                         115
## 14 PORTER WRIGHT MORRIS & ARTHUR LLP   106
## 15 HEBREW UNION COLLEGE                105

Political Makeup of Cincinnati

It’s also crucial to understand what percentage of contributions went to Republican, Democratic, or Third Party Committees. The following visualization shows that the Republican Party has a slight edge against other parties at 53.1% compared to the Democratic Party at 46.7%.

Self-Directed Analysis

Political Party Representation at UC and XU

For my self-directed analysis, I was interested in finding out the exact political party representation for donors employed by the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. UC donors are 84.2% Democrat and 15.8% Republican. Xavier donors are 87.6% Democrat and 12.4% Republican. Below are graphs showing my findings.