When you give money to a political candidate, you’re not just paying for their overhead and campaign-related expenses. You’re also helping to support the causes and candidates that they support. This last post in my series on campaign finance reports is a look at this kind of spending by candidates.
First, we have things like political contributions, charitable donations, and gifts. This Google spreadsheet documents what I found in the July reports. My notes:
– For the most part, these are the entries for which the category is either “Contributions/Donations Made by Candidate/Officeholder/Political Committee” or “Gift/Awards/Memorials Expense”. As always, not everyone fills these forms out the same way, and some classifications are ambiguous, so while I tried to be consistent, I may not have done this the way you would have. And of course, I might have missed some things.
– There’s not that much overlap among the payees, which means I couldn’t use Open Office Calc’s wonderful fill-in capabilities as there were almost no common names, so pretty much everything is copied and pasted in directly from the forms. That means that any misspellings or weird capitalizations are as in the originals.
– One area of commonality is with donations made to various political clubs and organizations. It’s no great secret that election season is a good time for these groups, as candidates seeking endorsements like to make positive impressions in whatever ways they can. Some groups require you to be a member in order to be eligible for an endorsement screening.
– That makes this one of the easy ways to tell which candidate plays for which team in our ostensibly non-partisan municipal elections. There’s a little bit of crossover, but not much that I saw here, and not nearly as much as with who gives to the candidates.
– One way that I tend to rationalize all of the spending by PACs and other usual suspects is that it’s basically trickle-down economics in action. This is especially the case for candidates that don’t face strong opposition. Frankly, it’s fine by me for some of this money to get passed through to other worthy causes.
– I counted 37 donations or contributions for Ellen Cohen, which was by far the most. James Rodriguez with 24 and Ronald Green with 20 were the runners up.
– The other spreadsheet I created is this one, which lists membership fees and dues for various organizations. There were only a handful of these, and in retrospect I should have rolled them into the first spreadsheet. There’s not really much of interest to say about it.
So there you have it. The main category that I left unexplored in this is advertising and printing, and that’s mostly because at this point in the campaign there isn’t much to note. There’s yard signs and T shirts and the occasional odd trinket, but most of the advertising expenses are either blurbs in specialty newspapers and organizational newsletters, or sponsorships of some kind. The stuff that’s really worth watching for will be in the 30 day and 8 day reports. I’ll do what I can with those later. Hope you found these reports useful.