Follow the Money

Finding Battleground States in the Election

During this election season many Americans are going to donate to political campaigns. Since they are putting up money we can think of them as these campaign’s hard line supporters. We can use them as a touch stone to compare the progress of the different campaigns and make an informed guess at how the election will play out.

So what Americans are helping pay for which campaign?

Using data from the Federal Election Commission and then geolocating these donors we can get a county-by-county map of which candidate has received the most direct support over the last half of 2015. This gives us a rough understanding of how different areas of the country favor candidates and a differentiation of Democrat vs Republican. Note that these counts are individual people donating and not corporations or PACs.

Each chart shows candidate with the most support in each county (if there are donors). The more support they have the darker their color is.

The Democrats

Sanders has a reputation for building a campaign that is funded by a large number of small donations, which would explain his large spread and geographic dominance in the country. Clinton, on the other hand, has small islands of intense dominance in major US cities and DC.

The Republicans

Cruz appears to be the front runner for donations around the country, with Rubio having a small presence in Florida. Trump, being independently wealthy has not appeared to put effort into funding his campaign.

Sanders vs Cruz

While these maps are represent a very early view of the next 10 (grueling) months some patterns start to appear. While there is a stereotypical North-South divide for the Democrats and Republicans, we also see a few interesting points.

There are two candidates that have a large but subtle spread across the country — Sanders and Cruz. Using the same process as before we can compare the two candidates.

The major difference when comparing these two charts is that Sanders has more supporters on the West coast than Cruz (an area which he owns when compared to other Republicans). Still, Sanders appears to dominate the early crop of donors.

Battleground States

Some of these states are looking pretty clear cut already. Texas will probably vote Republican and Vermont will cheer Sanders on. Yet, there are some ares of the country that are either contested and donating to several candidates or donating to none.

Florida, for example, is one of the states that is donating to both Sanders and Rubio. With so many voters that are showing their support for both sides there is surely going to be a significant amount of campaigning by both sides to win every possible vote.

On the other side, the Midwest has shown little support for any candidate — only Chicago and Minneapolis stand out. Since Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have been swing states in the past few elections we can count these in as battleground states. This will lead to see vigorous campaigning in these states as candidates attempt to create voters for themselves.