Who Donated Money?
A Wordle Donors Professions
The ELEC requires all individual election donors to report what they consider their profession. As is very clear from the Wordle, retired people make up the bulk of campaign contributions even though most people are not retired. Retired people tend to be older and older people tend to be more politically involved. There are large contributions from people who consider themselves as having a management/executive position or a legal job, like lawyers. Executives might want to gain favour with elected officials to ensure that all laws passed won't hurt their business. A good way to do that is to donate money to candidates. Lawyers tend to make up the bulk of politicians in the US. The legal professionals who donate money might be trying to build political capital for their own campaigns in the future. Interestingly, homemakers also contributed significant amounts of money. This may be cases where someone is trying to give more money to a campaign than contribution caps will permit. These donors can simply have their spouse give the money instead. Since campaign contribution limits are calculated for each individual, this would be aloud.
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A Mosaic Display of Donor's Occupation and Donation Amount
While this mosaic display does show that retired people represented a massive amount of donations, it also shows that they often donated less than $49.00. Once you start looking at larger donations, like the $199.50-$500.50 and the over $500.50 categories, retirees no longer represent the largest group People who consider themselves as having a management/executive or a legal job contribute far larger amounts of money overall. While traditional campaign wisdom is that older, more likely to be retired, people donate more to campaigns, retired people are also more likely to be living on a fixed income and unable to donate large sums of money. Legal and management/executive jobs tend to be on the higher range of salaries in the United States, so it is logical that they would donate more to campaigns. It is also possible that some of these people have dreams of political careers themselves or want the Governor to work in their interest, so hope to build political capital by donating money. Overall the larger donation categories seem to have a more diverse range of professions donating than the smaller donation categories.
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