Who Pays?
Political Contributions to New York State Politicians 2015-2020
This is an analysis of donations to state politicians representing the five boroughs of New York City
from January 2015 to January 2020.
The data also includes public officials that hold statewide positions, such as Andrea Stewart-Cousins,
the majority leader of the senate, and the four elected statewide positions: governor,
lieutenant governor, attorney general, and comptroller.
You can explore the underlying data more on your own with the WhoPaysNY Interactive Tool.
Methodology:
The donation data comes from the New York State Board of Elections reports:
https://www.elections.ny.gov/CFViewReports.html.
The donations include those filed for the current politicians and their committees from January 2015 through the January 2020
filing date. The candidates included are those politicians that currently represent the five boroughs in the State Senate and Assembly,
plus the majority leader of the senate, Andrea Stewart Cousins, and the four statewide positions:
governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, and attorney general. The filing committees were compiled by searching for the policitians'
names in the name of the committee. This is an imperfect search that is ongoing. There were some candidates that weren't included because they had no
filing committees that had recent filings clearly associated with their names. A review to include them is ongoing.
Because of the lack of clarity about committees that are associated with the politicians, as well as the conservative nuture of the clustering of donors together, these numbers can be considered a "minimum."
The donors were clustered across different candidates' filings with the dedupe python library: https://github.com/dedupeio/dedupe. Additional human review is ongoing. There are still different clusters within the dataset that should be considered the same "donor," The intention is to continue to improve the mapping and naming of the linked donors. If you would like to explore the underlying data in more detail you can go to the WhoPaysNY Interactive Tool.