Executive Summary

Matching the all-contributions list of the ActBlue Data File against the “surnames occurring 100 times or more” list from U.S. Census 2010, we matched all of the individual contributions with the surname list to determine how much Latinos are investing in the Democratic Presidential campaigns.

Using a probability-weighted or expected-value method based on the prevalence of Hispanics for each surname, the best estimate from this surname contributor list is that 713,678 contributions (transactions, not donors) garnered $13.54 million from Latinos from January 1, 2019 through June 30, 2019 to the presidential campaigns. This data shows that Latinos contributed 10.31% of the total contributor dollar amount in the Census 2010 surname list.

Using ‘best guess estimate’ of the Latino contribution rate for (1) surnames with suppressed Hispanic prevalence values inside the surname list, and (2) surnames outside (not matched against) the list could add an additional $1.35 million to the estimate above for every 1% that can be attributed to Latinos.

Click here to view all of the fully interactive reports and analysis.

Estimating Latino Contributions to the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates

ActBlue provides a semi-annual report of its itemized contributions to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). This data is central to keeping transparency in the electoral process to ensure that no ‘dark money’ is influencing any candidate or subverting the U.S. election process. Presidential campaigns that use ActBlue for fundraising have their donations earmarked for their respective campaigns and can easily be distinguished for reporting purposes.

The FEC filing system is a place where anyone can see who is contributing to a campaign and at what levels. Additional data is available on all federal candidates, campaign committees, political action committees (PAC’s) and Super PAC’s.

This election cycle, the Democratic National Committee is using individual donations as a key factor in determining which candidates can advance in the Democratic debates. In order to reach the fifth debate in November, candidates must reach the threshold of 165,000 unique donors, and 600 unique donors in at least 20 states by October 25, 2019.

To date, only nine (9) candidates have qualified by meeting both the fundraising and polling threshold including: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Cory Booker, and Tom Steyer. Three (3) candidates who have met the fundraising threshold but have yet to meet the polling threshold are waiting to see if they may qualify including Tusli Gabbard, and Julian Castro. Beto O’Rourke met the fundraising threshold but dropped out on Friday, November 1st and is no longer seeking the Democratic party nomination.

At Plus Three, we use this public data to provide insight and shine light on how Latinos are engaging in political campaigns and specifically which campaigns they are donating to. The perception has long been that Latinos are not donors to political campaigns and are not heavily invested in the outcomes of elections when measured by giving tendencies or voter turnout.

In this report, we put this theory to the test.

Methodology

The ActBlue file “Mid-Year Report 2019" has 25,725,487 records with a total contributor receipt amount of $457,407,771. We prepared the dataset by removing all campaign committees, PAC’s, Super PAC’s and Non-Presidential campaign data. This yields a gross contributions dataset containing 4,712,247 transactions (totaling $131,273,383.49)upon which we based this analysis.

Surnames Occurring 100 Times or More from Census 2010

There are 162,255 total surnames which occur 100 times or more in Census 2010. In the data file, there is a distribution of self-reported race and ethnicity responses associated with each surname captured on the Census 2010 form. The possible choices are White (pctwhite), Black (pctblack), Asian or Pacific Islander (pctapi), American Indian or Alaskan Native (pctaian), two or more races (pct2race) and Hispanic (pcthispanic). Using the pcthispanic variable, we categorized surnames by Hispanic prevalence: