Maps and Sneezes

Friends, I have a cold, and I am not gonna finish the full post I had planned. Too tired.

Instead, here’s a sneak peek of what I’m working on! I’m (as always) super interested in FEC data, and trying to chase down a particular theory about the asymmetry between donors and voters. We know that donors cluster hard in Democratic strongholds, and that they tend to donate to multiple campaigns. We also know there’s huge incentives to cultivate that national donor base. In theory, we can get a ton of detail on this from the FEC, but the details are tricky.

As a proof of concept, I grabbed donations from the October 2025 reports filed by Cory Booker and John Ossoff (since they are the top 2 fundraisers are reported by the FEC). I’ve also mapped them geographically, since the FEC helpfully provides donor details.

Here’s Ossoff:

and here’s Booker:

You may notice that these are basically “home state, California, New York”. This seems to be true for ~every candidate. From initial results, that also seems to be the case for Actblue data (i.e. donations under $200 total), but mostly because a lot of large dollar contributions come from candidate home states. The distribution of number of contributions is basically the same in itemized vs unitemized. I have zip code data as well- we will see if that looks different! Maybe there’s hotspots in CA that cluster around different candidates? Idk.

The next thing I’m working on is figuring out how many of these donors are literally the same people between candidates. The universe of donors seems under-studied. I don’t have an amazing sense of the actual size of the group we’re talking about, and candidates have every incentive to exaggerate their numbers or only discuss number of donations rather than unique donors. Deduplication and matching are hard, but I think I can get a good-enough answer.

More later!