How Much Money was Raised?

Box Plots showing bottom 25th percentile, top 75th percent tile, and the median amount of a donation for independents, Republicans, and Democrats.

A Box Plot of Contributions to Democrats, Independents, and Republicans

Unsurprisingly the average donation and the upper 75th percentile for the Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates is more than the average donation to Independent candidates. While the Democrats do have a higher contribution amount across the board, indicating that the Democratic candidates might have more money than the Republican candidates, the visualizations do now show how many people donated. The Democrats also had an extreme outlier that might pull some of their averages up; the Democratic candidate himself, Jon Corzine, was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs so had the resources and was willing to contribute significant amounts of his personal money to his own campaign, far exceeding the contribution limits for non-candidate donors. The difference could also be because Democrats voters gave more money to Democratic candidates than Republicans voters gave to Republican candidates. This would have posed a problem for Republicans because conventional campaign wisdom is that more money is always better.

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a packed bubble graph showing just how much larger Jon Corzine's maximum donation was than everyone else.

A Packed Bubble Chart Showing The Maximum Donations Made by Contributors to Each Candidate and Abot How Many People Contributed to Each Campaign

While it should not be shocking that Jon Corzine and Chris Christie have the largest number of contributions, since they were the two major candidates in the general election, what is surprising is just how large Corzine's contributions to his own campaign actually were. Corzine's largest contribution stands so far outside what everyone else gave that it actually affects the scale of the graph. We can also see that his donation is larger than many of the maximum donations to Chris Christie combined. According to page 17 of the ELEC's 2017 Compliance Manual for Candidates, a candidate can contribute limitless amounts of money to their own campaign provided the candidate is not a "publicly funded gubernatorial candidate." The packed bubble chart also shows just how many more donations Chris Christie received compared to everyone else running. While he did not have the most money or the largest donations, it is reasonable to assume that Christie was the most popular candidate in the election. This is confirmed by his victory in the general election.

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