Where is the money coming from in DC’s June 19th primary?
Tuesday is the Democratic primary in Washington DC. On the ballot are races for mayor, council chair, council seats in Wards 1, 5, and 6, an at-large council seat, as well as for attorney general, the city’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, and unpaid shadow senator.
How do the candidates compare in terms of where they’re getting their funds? Understanding where donations are coming from can shed light on the partnerships each candidate is building. That’s valuable context for the decision on June 19th as well as the work moving forward for whoever wins these races.
With that in mind, here’s a synopsis of all the donations made in the primary races thus far. This analysis aggregates Reports by Donor Type data from the DC Office of Campaign Finance. It includes all reports available between July 2017 and June 2018. That includes five separately reported periods: July 31, 2017; December 10, 2017; January 31, 2018; March 10, 2018; and June 10, 2018. It examines how the candidates compare in terms of the types of donors supporting their campaigns and the size of the donations coming in. Candidates are listed in the order they appear on the ballot.
Candidates for Mayor of the District of Columbia
Candidates for Council Chair
Candidates for At-Large Member of the Council of the District of Columbia
Candidates for Ward 1 Member of the Council of the District of Columbia
Candidate for Ward 3 Member of the Council of the District of Columbia
Candidates for Ward 5 Member of the Council of the District of Columbia
Candidates for Ward 6 Member of the Council of the District of Columbia
Candidate for Attorney General for the District of Columbia
Candidate for United States Senator
The Office of Campaign Finance publishes Reports by Donor Types as PDF files. With 24 candidates and five report periods to examine, this analysis required downloading and collecting information from more than 100 individual PDF documents.
It’s great that this information is available—every voter deserves to have information about where candidates are getting their donations be open and available online. Converting the information from PDF documents into a spreadsheet that could allow for this comparison took two full days of work. Office of Campaign Finance staff, if you are reading this, consider publishing these reports as machine-readable documents to begin with.
That said, you can explore this donation information in more depth in the comprehensive spreadsheet powering this analysis. In there are several interesting or noteworthy points:
- In the mayoral race, Muriel Bowser has a serious troll who donated the almost-passive-aggressive amount of $0.01 on May 10. Her competitor Ernest Johnson has reported a total of $30 in donations, raising more questions than we could possibly answer here about where the rest of that campaign’s money is. And four individuals donated identical amounts to James Butler on the same day in September — all labeled as “Labor” rather than individuals.
- Dionne Reeder, a candidate for the at-large seat, is the only person who has “Democratic” as a donor category. That was for a donation from the “Committee to Elect Jacque Patterson”, a former candidate for Ward 8 Council.
- Brianne Nadeau hit the ground running financially and filed an enormous report in July 2017. Most candidates don’t have a July 2017 filing, usually because they didn’t begin their campaign until the fall. Not only did Brianne have a July filing, it included $189,000 in donations — more than some other candidates’ entire reported amounts by an order of magnitude.
- Kent Boese made the single largest contribution for any of the council races — $10,000.00. He’s donated $19,414.95 to his own campaign to date, over $11,000 more than any other candidate. The largest donation of the primary, however, goes to Karl Racine whose Karl Racine For AG Committee donated $16,846.31 to his campaign in October.
- Finally, the award for most mysterious donations sequence goes to Bradley Thomas, for these eight sets of identical donations in seemingly random amounts from 28 different people — including Thomas himself:
Not all candidates filed reports for all five donation periods. This is most commonly the case because candidates began their campaigns at different times. The full spreadsheet lists all candidates who have filed disclosures with the Office of Campaign Finance. More detailed analysis is only available for candidates who will be included on the June 19th ballot. Candidates for political party committee races were not included. The filings contain some categorization errors. For example, an LLC categorized as a “Corporation,” or a political action committee categorized as “Other” instead of a PAC. We intentionally did not correct these apparent errors in our analysis. The exception to this is where candidates were categorized as “Individual” donors. “Candidate” is its own category and different limits apply to candidates donating to their own campaigns. In cases where we identified a Candidate listed as an Individual, we have changed the donation categorization and annotated it in the spreadsheet. In addition, the two separate entities “Friends of Jamie Sycamore” and “Elect Jamie Sycamore” have been combined for this analysis.
Use this information to learn more about the candidates you’re considering on June 19th, and for how you participate in DC’s government in the years ahead. View the full spreadsheet to explore this information in more detail. And above all, VOTE!
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