In a post yesterday, I wrote about Senator Kay Hagan’s agitprop against the Koch Brothers political support for conservative causes and candidates. Today, in an article on Powerline, HERE, Steven Haywood calls attention to the bias in political donations among the top fifteen donors as listed by OpenSecrets, a website maintained by the left-wing Center For Responsive Politics.
Among the big-fifteen, there were three corporate donors, one Democratic PAC, one non-partisan PAC, and ten unions. Curious, I analyzed the figures a bit more to learn the following:
The donations of the three corporate donors and the National Association of Realtors PAC, individually and in total, tended to be divided between Democrats and Republicans about 45% / 45%, give or take 4% either way. This suggests to me that they are mostly just trying to grease both rails on the track without appearing to be overly biased in either direction. I therefore view these as being effectively non-partisan.
Although many donations are made indirectly via PAC’s, of the direct partisan donations (i.e., going to recipients directly identifiable as being Democrats or Republicans, and excluding the non-partisan donations) on this top-fifteen list, 83% were to Democrat recipients versus 17% to Republican recipients.
Of the direct partisan donations to Democrats, 81% came from unions and 19% came from a Democratic PAC (ActBlue).
If the non-partisan donations are removed from the equation, leaving only the donations from the ten unions plus the ActBlue PAC, the overall breakdown reveals that 97% of the partisan donations went to Democrats, and 3% went to Republicans. Of the donations to Democrats from partisan sources, 78% of the money came from the unions, and 22% from the ActBlue PAC.
Among the take-aways from this, in my view:
In spite of the left-wing agitation about corporate political donations (and the SCOTUS decision on the Citizens United case), they are not really much of a factor overall because they are distributed fairly evenly between the two political parties.
Of the partisan donations (i.e., going to recipients directly identifiable as being Democrats or Republicans, and excluding the non-partisan donations), the overwhelming majority (97%) go to the Democrats.
Although left-wing PACs are a factor, of the partisan donations going to Democrats, the bulk of the money continues to come from the unions.
As always, the devil is in the details.
And finally, if any of our members wishes to review my work on this, e-mail me and I will send the Excel spreadsheet.