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Who Donates in Campaigns?

Who Donates in Campaigns?

The Importance of message, messenger, medium, and Structure David B. Magleby, Jay Goodliffe, Joseph A. Olsen

Acknowledgements

The data examined in this book is unusual in two ways. First, thanks to the cooperation of the John McCain, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns, we were provided random samples of small donors, with the samples drawn to our specifications. This allows us to study donors whose identity is not available through traditional FEC donor disclosure procedures. Trevor Potter of the McCain campaign, Bob Bauer of the Obama campaigns, and Spencer Zwick and Matt Waldrip of the Romney campaign were instrumental to our securing the samples of small presidential donors from 2008 and 2012. We greatly appreciate their assistance. The sample is also unusual in that it includes random samples of donors who gave more than $200 in the aggregate to candidates. Data kept by the Federal Election Commission is of every contribution from a donor giving more than $200 to that candidate, party committee, PAC, etc. Drawing a sample from this database would have oversampled people who give more frequently and undersampled those who give only once. We therefore merged the FEC donation data creating a dataset allowing us to sample donors. We are grateful for the participation of computer science colleagues in this data linkage. Bob Biersack and Paul Clark at the Federal Election Commission helped us understand the available data.

Our research on donors was also enhanced through the cooperation of 115 individuals who consented to be interviewed by us about this topic. Nearly all of these interviews were audio-recorded on-the-record interviews. We also welcomed “off-the-record” information. Throughout the book you will find quotes from campaign participants which help put our analysis of donor surveys and the broad trends on contributions from individuals into context.

A project of this scope would not have been possible without the generous support of foundations and our university. We express appreciation for funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation as well as to Brigham Young University which provided an undergraduate student mentoring grant and other financial support. BYU’s Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy provided us with much needed space to house the student research assistants and safely store completed questionnaires in a secure environment. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of BYU Statistics Professor Howard Christensen for consultation on our sampling strategies. Our colleagues in Computer Science at BYU, Christophe Giraud-Carrier, Matt Smith, Yao Huang, Weston Rowley, and David Wilcox, assisted in developing the data linkage algorithms used with the FEC data. Laura Quinn and her associates were helpful in appending information to a large list of names we provided, which included our sample. Dana Morey’s data entry firm entered the data from respondents who participated in the project by returning paper questionnaires. The College of Family, Home and Social Sciences Computing Services group, especially Ken Millard and Bruce Burgon, helped us with the data linkage in 2012, and to manage our large data sets.

We have benefitted from the feedback from colleagues at BYU and more broadly. Especially helpful to us were comments from Elisabeth Gerber, Chris Karpowitz, Jennifer Lawless, Arthur Lupia, Michael Malbin, Quin Monson, Candy Nelson, Kelly Patterson, Jeremy Pope, and Costas Panagopoulos. David Nickerson provided key insights from his time working on the Obama campaign and introducing us to others whom we also interviewed. We also benefitted from faculty seminars at Temple University and the University of Michigan on parts of this project. Lynda Powell, John Aldrich, Melanie Freeze, and Peter Francia, all scholars who have published previous studies of donors, shared data with us which we used to compare donor behavior over time.

Research assistance was provided by several gifted undergraduates over the course of this project. Among those who helped were Kaeli McCall Anderson, Troy Anderson, Philip Barr, Zachary Barrus, Ryan Beachum, Caroline Black, Nicholas Boyer, Ethan Busby, Geoff Cannon, Hyrum Clarke, MaKade Claypool, Josh Cooper, Stephanie Curtis, Kenneth Daines, Matthew Doane, Rebecca Eaton, Jeff Edwards, Taylor Elwood, Matt Frei, Bree Gardner, Clarissa Gregory, John Griffith, Carlie Hibbert, John Holbein, Eric Hoyt, Andrew Jensen, Bradley Jones, Katie Kleinert, Carlie Hibbert, Kirsten Hinck, Colton Keddington, Nikki Christensen Keddington, Jesse Keyser, Luke MacDonald, Malcolm Merrill, David Lassen, Phillip Manwaring, Cameron McAlister, Dallin McKinnon, Haley McCormick, Payden McRoberts, Jacob Nielson, Grady Nye, Cody Olive, Dustin Phelps, Robert Richards, Calvin Roberts, Nicholas Roweton, Tyler Simms, Tessa Sheffield, Jill Vaughn, Case Wade, Courtney Waters, and Sam Williams. While some were involved in this project more intensively than others, all made important contributions in helping build the datasets and doing the different kinds of research found in the book. We very much appreciate their individual and collective contributions.

We express appreciation to Anthony Nathe who provided a helpful edit of the manuscript and Suzy Bills and her associates at the BYU Faculty Editing Service who prepared the index. Robert Dreesen of Cambridge University Press provided helpful encouragement. We are grateful to the entire team at Cambridge University Press for their professionalism. We dedicate this book to our spouses whose support made a project of this magnitude possible.