Newsworthy contributions
By Jack Dolan CFIC
If the CEO of a casino company gives $1,500 dollars to a state senator running for reelection, is it news? Giving money to a candidate you believe in is not undemocratic. For most busy people, it is more practical to promote their ideals by writing a check than by stumping door-to-door with brochures. So when do campaign contributions become news?
The consensus at Indiana CAR was that determining which contributions lead to good stories is difficult to do with contribution data alone. Experienced campaign data crunchers, like David Poole of the Virginia Public Access Project, suggest taking the analysis further. First, Poole says, get the candidate's financial disclosure forms. If the candidate has two kids working for a casino or owns stock in a casino, noting a few hundred dollars' worth of gaming company contributions barely scratches the surface of the story.
Next, check the committee assignments of incumbents. Kevin Murphy of The Kansas City Star recently wrote about contributions of $1,500 from gaming executives to the co-chair of the gaming and wagering committee of the Missouri Senate. The senator recently proposed abolishing hourly loss limits for casino customers.
Then there are the aggregate stories: Which industries gave the most? What did they get in return? These stories are the real data challenge because summing contributions from a single contributor can be difficult if the name is entered in different ways. The difficulty grows exponentially when you try to sum contributions from an entire industry.
But if you have the patience and data skills to standardize contributor names, the reward can be staggering. With technical help from the Center for Public Integrity, The Indianapolis Star/News chronicled how a consortium of businesses aligned with the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce went on an unprecedented spending spree and, coincidentally, got its entire legislative agenda passed. According to the Star/News report, "When some lawmakers tried to protest or even debate the issues, they were reminded in private meetings to stick with the the money that got them elected."
Another good aggregate story, by Shirish Date of The Palm Beach Post, clawed its way to the heart of one of the sadder ironies of the modern legislative process. The Post requested records of contracts with registered lobbyists from every public agency in the state and then entered those records into an Excel spreadsheet. According to the resulting story, "Last year, Florida taxpayers paid more to lobbyists to influence their own legislators than they paid in salaries to those same lawmakers."
Wendell Cochran of American University reminds reporters to understand the system the data describes. "For every complex problem, there is a simple answer wrong." Cochran says one oversimplified approach to campaign finance reporting is the bribe paradigm: rich businessmen bought candidate X's vote. Cochran says we should not ignore the possibility that candidate X solicited the rich businessman's contribution. He calls this the "blackmail paradigm." Cochran advises asking contributors how they came to give the money and getting on the candidate or committee mailing lists so you know when they are directly soliciting from industry-wide groups.