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Tech Employees' Donations To The Clinton and Trump Campaigns
This repository contains data and code supporting the BuzzFeed News article, "Clinton Receives Thirty Times As Much Tech Cash As Trump," published October 27, 2016.
Data
The contributions used in this analysis come from Federal Election Commission filings submitted by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's principal campaign committees:
| Committee Name | Committee ID |
|---|---|
| HILLARY FOR AMERICA | C00575795 |
| DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, INC. | C00580100 |
In Schedule A, Line 17A of those filings, the committees list all itemized contributions. (Committees are required to itemized contributions from any person who has given the campaign $200 or more during the 2015–16 election cycle.) In Schedule A, Line 18, the committees list transfers from other authorized committees, including the alloted portions of individual contributions to joint-fundraising committees (e.g., Trump Make America Great Again Committee). More details, including the computer scripts used to obtain the filings from the ProPublica Campaign Finance API and the FEC, can be found here.
As with any broad analysis of campaign contributions, there's some imprecision involved. For example, some donors may not have correctly identified their employers. Additionally, campaigns are not required to “itemize” contributions from a donor until that donor has contributed $200 or more. And this analysis does not incorporate refunds to donors; in the FEC data, those reimbursements do not identify the payee’s employer.
Analysis
The analysis was conducted in the Python programming language, and can be found here.
Company-by-company contribution totals for the 20 companies can be found here. That spreadsheet has two numeric columns:
itemized_contributionscounts only the itemized contributions listing the employer.sum_max_aggtries to infer the total (including non-itemized contributions), based on the maximumcontribution_aggregatefield for each first-name/last-name/employer combination. This approach isn't foolproof but should, generally, provide an upper-bound estimate for contributions.
Individual itemized donations from employees at those 20 tech companies can be found here.
The raw employer names included in the employer-name groups can be found here.
A rough assessment of the employer names associated with the most money contributed to each campaign can be found here (Clinton) and [here] (output/top-employers-trump.csv) (Trump). For more detail regarding those lists, please see the bottom of the analysis notebook.
Feedback
Contact Jeremy Singer-Vine at jeremy.singer-vine@buzzfeed.com.
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