The inspiration for this project comes from my Project 1. It became clear working with the campaign finance data for project 1 that there are some major repeat donors who donate across politicians, but because of the way the data is recorded, it is difficult to track that. As part of project 1, I used a machine learning libraries to deduplicate the donors accross campaign committee filings and campaigns and group them together, on the organizational level. This project is an analysis of who these donors are, what groups dominate, and who these top donors are. I found extra inspiration in a story that broke the week of May 11th about how Cuomo had hidden a provision to protect the owners of nursing homes in the budget.
My questions are there “kinds of donors”? What are the stratifications? Who donates? Who gives the most money? Who benefits the most from these political donations?
The intended users are local-politics nerds who want to better understand the “players” in Albany, and local journalists who are looking for breadcrumbs that might lead to stories.
The data comes from the statewide board of elections for city and state-level officials. I am limiting it just to elected state-wide officials whose districts cover at least part of the 5 boroughs (not other parts of the state). I have, like I said, done clustering of existing donors based on address and name, to identfy organizations that are the same organization accross different candidates and filings. Full technical documentation can be found here.