Which industires are giving?

When looking at which industries are donating most to the political campaigns, it is evident that the top two categories are lawyers and retirees. Lawyers have given the Obama campaign $36 million and the McCain campaign $9 million, and retirees have given Obama $40 million and McCain $32 million. While both have done extremely well getting contributions from both groups, it is important to point out McCain’s significantly high level of support form retirees. This goes along with McCain’s traditional base of support: older conservative whites, including those who are racially conservative. This past June and July, McCain raised nearly twice that of Obama from retirees, $8.1 million compared to $4.5 million. That’s a total of $12.6 million donated to by retirees, more than any other industry during that time period. Out of political donations by retirees, 64% of funds have gone to McCain.

Following those two industries, McCain is mainly funded by the security, investment, oil and gas, and real estate industries. McCain’s top donors include Merrill Lynch, at $359,000, Citigroup Inc, at $296,00, and Morgan Stanley, at $262,000. These commercial banking companies, along with a slew of others, total $1.9 million in donations to McCain. Also, none of McCain’s major donors are universities.

In comparison, Obama is funded by those in education, entertainment, the Internet and security and investment. His top donors include the University of California, at $909,000, Goldman Sachs, at $874,000, and Harvard University, at $717,000. Of his top 20 donors, four of them are major universities, and as of July 2008 Obama had raised $10 million from universities. Obama’s commercial banking donations add up to $2 million and include companies like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Another industry that has given significant amounts of money is the tech industry. Unlike the banking and real estate industries, technology had no ties to political parties or families when the presidential election of 2008 began. So, Obama claimed the Silicon Valley in California as his own. Because the industry had no ties and because it was so geared towards the younger crowd, this was a perfect outlet for Obama. Young entrepreneurs in the industry, like 38 year-old Steve Spinner, have been the key to raising large sums of money. Through social networking on Facebook, MySpace and MyYahoo Spinner raised over $250,000 for Obama. Other young entrepreneurs, like Chris Hughes who is a co-founder of Facebook, went to Chicago to work on the campaign full-time during the campaign season. Together these young techies developed My.BarackObama.com, a social networking site in which a large component was fundraising. The site generated over 200 million dollars for the campaign.

In short, the main industries giving to the 2008 presidential campaigns are lawyers, retirees, security and investment, commercial banking, education and technology.

Here is a great chart where you can see donations by industry from 1990-2008. The vertical axis on the left represents donations to Republicans and the horizontal axis represents donations to Democrats. You can change the time period by moving the scroll bar at the bottom at the center or pressing the play button.



For further reading:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/campaign-08-most-expensive-ever/?scp=2&sq=campaign%20spending&st=cse
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance
www.opensecrets.org