Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Cool stats....let's buy some influence

Most Heavily Partisan Industries | OpenSecrets

6 comments:

  1. This list is not surprising. It explains a lot on why people in each party vote in favor of these types of industries. As I was looking at these industries over time they seem to not change very much.

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    1. I agree. I did the same thing and the rank of the percentage donated to the parties did not change too much over time either. I found it interesting the types of organizations that did donate to the certain parties. I am not surprised by the types of organizations but I did find the contrast interesting. For example, the republicans did get funding from anti-abortion and tobacco companies while the democrats received money from education and women's rights.

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  2. I agree with Kenny but I find two groups particularly interesting in this breakdown. The first group that caught my eye were that Lawyers and Law firms, while I was somewhat surprised by how much they spent, it was not a total shock, However I was more surprised that 68% of their spending goes to democrats, which is by far the largest amount given to democrats. I expected that to be more evenly spread or even favoring Republicans.
    The other group that I found interesting was the oil and gas industry. Compared to the over $52 million spent by lawyers/law firms, this industry only gives less than half of that ($23 million), and still almost 10 percent of that goes to Democrats. Considering many ultra-wealthy conservative Republicans are in the oil/gas industry (like the Koch brothers), I expected this amount to be much greater.

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    1. True, I think it's surprising how little money is actually given, but we must keep in mind that these are the companies themselves as opposed to the wealthy individuals. As we've read in "Dark Money", the Kochs and numerous other wealthy Americans create foundations, charities, and other organizations that can be used as loopholes through the political donor system. Now that Citizens United stands, it's even easier for people to funnel untracable amounts of cash towards their politicians of choice, which is exactly what the Kochs are doing instead of implicating their businesses. It's also important to remember that the Koch's Industry is a conglomerate that spans across many fields including: oil, gas, chemicals, mining, livestock, agriculture, finance and many more. A lot of these actually fit into the Republican donor list.

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  3. Another thing I find interesting is the relatively steep drop-off in the percentage these groups give to democrats compared to republicans. The 20th most partisan group for republicans gives over 73% of their money to republicans where as the 20th most partisan group for democrats only gives 52% of their money to democrats. It seems like there are more partisan groups favoring republicans than democrats.

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  4. I think this chart not only gives me a better idea of what kind of policy each party supports, but also it simply indicates how Democrats are favored by the groups for the general public, like Women's Issues, Environment, Education, and Human Rights, whereas Republicans are favored by business corporations ranging from Oil&Gas, Mining to Tobacco industries.

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