Individual contributions on 2016 US Presidential Election
Finances play an important role in American electoral politics. Candidates strategize their campaign schedule keeping in mind both the votes and the money. Major candidates’ fundraising campaigns allow them to attract hundreds of thousands of dollars. This money comes from various sources - from individual citizens, political action committees, corporate sponsors. Considering the fact that raw figures tell little, I have developed an interactive tool that helps to track geography of campaign donations. The tool consists of the map filled with the information about all individual donations for two major candidates at 2016 Presidential elections in the USA. To locate each individual donation on the map I used zip-codes of the localities. The information about the size of the donation was gotten from the official source - website of Federal election Commission.
The navigation system of the map allows several options for tracking the geography of the donations. First, it provides an opportunity to see the geographical distribution of all donations for candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton simultaneously. Second, one may follow the donations for each candidate separately. Finally, it is possible to track a specific sum of donation as well as a donations’ range.
Min. sum of contribution
Max. sum of contribution
xxx Zip Codes
00,000,000
xxx Zip Codes
00,000,000
Other contributions
Donations from the outside of the continental territory of the USA and the donations that could not be placed on a map
The Bubble chart below allows to track the geography of individual donations from the outside of the territory of the USA. For example, this tool allows seeing of how much donations arrived from American military bases, Embassies, isles, etc. for both candidates. Moreover, it allows to separate the data onto categories and compare amounts and sizes of the donations.
Developed tool targets stakeholders who are interested to investigate American electoral finances. In the combination with other information, it allows speculating on the candidates’ financial strongholds and researching on how strategic are the candidates in pleasing these strongholds while planning their electoral campaign schedules. The tool also contributes those students of American political finances who are investigating an issue of “small money” in electoral campaigns. Finally, it could be easily used by anyone interested to find out how much money his neighboured donated and to which candidates.
The tool has a potential for further development by including the information about the donations at Congressional elections. Potentially, it could be filled with the data from the previous presidential elections that would provide an opportunity to make comparisons not only across space but also the time.