Average Donor Share - a new political statistic
While exploring campaign finance data for our most recent blog post on donor-estimated Massachusetts communities, we realized that there was a new political statistic buried in the data. As someone who spends my time outside of work listening to sports analytics podcasts, the chance to create a new statistic was too good to pass up. So here it is: Average Donor Share (but we’re open to better names).
The idea is simple.
If I am a political candidate, and all of my donors give to me and no one else, I have a 100% average donor share. I am the recipient of 100% of my donor’s political contributions. But if my donors all give half their contributions to me and half to other candidates, then I have a 50% ADS.
We have the 2021-2023 combined average donor share for all Massachusetts political candidates and entities open to view at the button below.
Caveat before you click
Now, before we go further, a massive caveat is in place. Campaign data is notoriously messy. The code identifies donors by their name and address, so if James Smith wrote his name on a donation to one candidate as “James Smith” and to another as “Jim Smith”, then he’d be treated as two different donors.
Therefore, all of the average donor shares are going to be higher than in real life; that James Smith / Jim Smith above would be seen as two donors with 100% ADS to each candidate, when it should have been 50% for each from him. However, with more than 1.7 million individual contributions in the dataset, there’s no way to manually clean the data and no clear reason why one set of candidates are more susceptible to this than others. We expect that the overall ranking is going to approximately accurate, and the numbers would need to be adjusted downwards to find the real number.
Some of the average donor shares in the mid-60%s - a common level for state representatives
What we found
You can see the average donor score for every entity and every office in the OCPF data from 2021 to 2023 (free with email signup).
Since this is a new concept, we don’t have any real conclusions about what is good or bad, only observations from the data - which, again, we want to stress is only approximate. You probably have your own thoughts and are more than welcome to look at the data and run with it.
But here are a few things we noticed looking at it.
State Reps have the lowest Average Donor Share
Thankfully, the Office of Campaign and Political Finance classifies every donation with the office for which the candidate is running. Combining all of them, we see that state representatives have the lowest ADS, while mayors have the highest non-judicial ADS.
This sees to make sense. If you donate to a state House candidate, there’s a good chance you’re politically engaged in the overall state political ecosystem and would donate to other candidates as well. Mayor’s, on the other hand, may tap into donors who are less engaged, but have met those candidates personally or who care about their immediate surroundings.
Incumbents have lower ADS than challengers (it seems)
The average ADS for House candidates is 72%, but in the picture above, you see the House Speaker and a number of other members of the legislature with ADSs in the mid-60s. This seems to follow a pattern - at least based on our initial scan of the data - in which incumbents have a smaller share of their donors’ checkbooks than challengers. For example, one recent primary election saw a freshman representative with an ADS in the 50s face off against a challenger with an ADS in the 90s.
This could be the result of a number of factors:
Incumbents have more time to raise money. This data is all of 2021-2023, so incumbents will be raising for all three years, whereas challengers raise in a few months before an election. This could allow incumbents to develop relationships with more of the donor class.
Challengers may be drawing on personal networks more. These people may not be typical donors, so they are only activated when someone they know chooses to run.
Donors may be more likely to give to multiple incumbents. If a person is looking to donate to candidates they connect with, incumbents present multiple options. A donor could give to their councillor, representative, and senator, or to the incumbents working on the issues they care about. A challenger may be more of a singular option.
Maura Healey tapped into new donors
As might be expected, Maura Healey’s run for governor connected with many donors who didn’t give anywhere else. With an approximate 95% ADS, she was well above other prominent officials like Michelle Wu (85%), Ron Mariano (66%), or Karen Spilka (52%). It shows clearly how the governor’s race appeals to many people for whom state politics is otherwise not a concern.
We don’t know if it’s good or bad to have a high score
In terms of what this says about a candidate, it’s still to early for us to know what is a good or bad placement. On the one hand, it could be good to have a high ADS. This means that you have a set of supporters that like you and you alone. This could mean that your endorsement and mailing list is more valuable than a typical candidate.
But it also could mean that it’s harder to raise more money, since a high average donor share may mean there’s not much more they can give. A lower average donor share could mean that you’re plugged into wider donor networks, who could shift spending to you if you’re in a competitive race. It could also be helpful if your donors are giving to many other candidates, because the possibility then emerges for joint fundraisers which may be more helpful for your political capital. For example, the Senate President’s relatively low ADS may actually be a sign that she is a helpful fundraising partner.
Again, this is a new metric and we make no conclusions yet about what it all means. More discussion is needed to know more.
What’s Next?
We encourage you to explore the data and use it for your own analysis or better understanding of Massachusetts politics. If you have other questions you’d like us to explore using publicly available data, get in touch at chris@legislata.com. If we can do it easily, we’re happy to publish it for free, and if it requires a bit more work, we can talk about pricing for a commission.
As with all of our research, it comes from our efforts to make working in policy easier, which we do via our app. It’s free to sign up, and has bill tracking for all 50 states and Congress, new events at the Mass. State House, transcripts of committee hearings - as well as the ability for you to add your own notes, messages, and content to share. You can also sign up for a free onboarding of the product to get started today.