Maybe some data can help us see behind the rhetoric? One way to gain insight into possible future behavior is to look at who is donating to the campaign and hoping to influence a new administration.
I downloaded data of the top bundlers of donations for the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns and the 2008 McCain campaign. What's the overlap of donors between the Bush and McCain campaigns? Will the same people influence both campaigns/administrations? Or will it be starkly different groups? Or something in between?
From The Fix @ washingtonpost.com...
McCain's bundler program is built on the incredibly successful "Pioneer" and "Ranger" program built by George W. Bush in 2000 and perfected four years later. The most valuable individuals in a bundling program are not necessarily the wealthiest individuals but rather those individuals with the deepest Rolodexes and a willingness to ask and ask and ask.
Below is a map of those who donated to BOTH Bush and McCain. The campaigns are shown as the two red nodes on the left of the map. The green links show donations coming into the McCain 2008 campaign. The blue lines show donations coming into the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. The 128 bundlers, who have contributed to both McCain and Bush, are shown in the arc on the right.
Most of McCain's 534 large bundled donations [76%] came from donors who did not donate to either of the Bush campaigns. Yet, this kernel of 128 bundlers keeps consistency across all three Republican campaigns in the 21st century.
Although the majority of McCain fundraisers were not Bush fundraisers, the Gang of 128 may not allow McCain to wander too far from the current philosophy and approach. If elected, McCain may be different than Bush, but he might not be that different.
Update: McCain 2008 Bundler List & Obama 2008 Bundler List
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4 comments:
Let's see if I have this right:
So, you have two sets of donors. You extract 128 who are common to the two data sets, and put them into your image. Then you observe and draw conclusions based on the resulting image of the overlap.
Huh? What in the world does that prove, other than you can create a graph with two foci and 128 points in common?
For the graph to be meaningful at all it has to include not only the overlapping data points but also the points that don't overlap. That's how you could illustrate the relative overlap between the two data sets.
The text of your post indicates that there are 534 donors unique to McCain, and 128 in common between McCain and Bush. This is not indicated in your graph. Surely that is the relevant observation to be depicted graphically here?
Do you by chance own a copy of Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information?" If you do, perhaps it's time to dust it off and re-read it. If you don't, you should definitely look into it.
You need to read the post again. Your description of what I did is wrong -- but serves your purpose.
Yes, only the map of overlaps was shown. It shows who has consistently donated to Republican presidential campaigns in the 21st century. If you dust off your sociology or poli sci 101 college texts you will see that often groups have greater influence than their mere numbers indicate. The text of the post explains the rest of the data and how they fit together.
Tufte never did social network analysis or visualization ... if he did, I would like to see it.
To be honest, I do not see any advantage of showing the relationships of the donors the way you did. I think you are shooting with canons at little birds (my free translation of a German bon mot). I guess it would be much more informative to discuss the ratios of common donors to other donors or analyze the relationship between the donors, if you find a way to get that piece of information. Just my two cents, regards, U.S.
Hi Valdis -- The key reason for your suspicion that McCain may be influenced by the 128 'overlaps' (out of 534) is that the 'overlaps' are likely to be especially big contributors and most influential in bringing in other contributors. The "Fix" article you cited indicated that McCain's website lists 106 of the biggest contributors ('Innovators' and 'Trailblazers').
If your map could look at the overlap between those 106 among Bush contributors, that might help strengthen your case.
On the other hand, there were a lot of wealthy conservatives who contributed to the Bush campaign because he was their best hope at the time. This doesn't help illuminate whether they prefer more of the same, or now hope that McCain will do a better job. McCain's far-right-dominated convention seems to be more telling about where he is headed.
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