Political Types Ate Pizza: You won’t believe what happened next
Since early this morning, analysts have been pouring over Mike Deehan’s controversial #mapoli pizza report, and have come to a shocking conclusion: campaign pizza expenditures are being woefully undercounted.
Deehan, citing the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, claims that all Massachusetts political campaigns combined have spent about $275,000 (closer to $271k actually) on pizza since May 2006. According to Deehan, Primo Pizza on Beacon Hill dominates the political pizza industry, followed by the flavored paper store that operates under the brand name Papa Gino’s.
However, the story crumbles under closer inspection. Deehan, by his own admission, searched OCPF for the word ‘pizza,’ thus limiting his search to either 1) reports that stated the objective of the expenditure as pizza, or 2) restaurants that have the name pizza in the title.
So what does actual pizza spending in #mapoli look like? It’s much worse than you think.
First, the original dataset severely undercounts the biggest players in Big Pizza. Domino’s, Papa Gino’s, Primo’s, Santarpios and Upper Crust accounted for just $22,257 of that $271k in the dataset. However, when you search OCPF for these individual brands and account for the various misspellings (Dominoes, Dominos, Domino’s, even a Popa Gino’s), the numbers skyrocket:
- Primo’s: $26,486
- Upper Crust: $19,257
- Papa Gino’s: $15,946
- Domino’s: $12,295
- Santarpio’s: $11,578
The total actual spending of these five chains alone accounts for $85,562 in pizza spending, $63,305 more than accounted for in the total of $271k, meaning spending at these five chains alone is roughly 380% higher than Deehan reported. Extrapolate that out across the rest of the data set, and pizza spending surges to more than $1 million since 2006.
But wait! Deehan’s data collection method also leaves out places that don’t have pizza in their name. For example, Brockton’s famed Cape Cod Cafe, home of the bar pie, is not represented in the data set. Campaign spending at the Cod is comparatively low ($3,175 since 2006), but is nonetheless excluded from the conversation, as is Brockton’s George’s Cafe ($5514) and Tin Ray’s ($1525).
In fact, if you sort the data by city, you’ll find that Brockton’s political spending on pizza supposedly adds up to just $7,487 over the past ten years. However, putting together searches for individually amazing pizza places in the City of Champions would show:
- West Side Cafe: $8,143
- George’s Cafe: $5,514
- Cape Cod Cafe: $3,175
- Stella’s: $2615
- Christo’s: $2,565
- Tin Ray’s: $1,525
- Goodfellas: $805
Brockton politicos alone ate more than $24,000 worth of pizza over the past ten years, or roughly $16,500 more than Deehan’s data would have you believe.
The clear takeaway here is that Big Pizza is working very hard to keep its #mapoli revenue underreported, and the media is helping them do it. How else to explain that nobody has reported former State Senator Bob O’Leary’s future pizza speculation:
