The real parties in Massachusetts politics - according to donors

Imagine that you met someone who said that they donated to Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and a mayor you’d never heard of. Or someone who said they donated to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and a city councillor.

Based on this, you could probably guess that the mayor is a Republican and the councillor is a Democrat. It may not be certain, since voters are idiosyncratic, but if we could get out every campaign donation in a state, track who shares donors with others, and then map out the groupings that emege from the data, we could get a sense of how donors as a whole group elected official.

That’s what we’ve done with all Massachusetts donations from 2021 to 2023.

Uncovering communities with campaign contributions

The Office of Campaign & Political Finance is the Bay State’s version of the FEC and provides every campaign contribution available for download on its website. We collected all contributions listed on every campaign reports and ran a network analysis algorithms to detect the communities based on candidates’ shared donors. So if a group of candidates tended to have the same donors, they’d be placed into one community, and a set of candidates with other donors would be in another.

We weighted each shared donor connection by the percentage of the donor’s total contributions - one donor who $10 to Michelle Wu and $10 to Maura Healey means a stronger connection between Wu and Healey than if the donor also gave $10 to every candidate for the legislature. We weight every donor equally, so the person who gives a few dollars counts the same as the PAC that maxes out, since it’s the decision about which candidates to give to that matter more than the money.

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. However, with more than 1.7 million individual contributions in the dataset, there’s no way to manually clean the data. And since it’s unlikely that this would bias the data in one particular direction, we think that the data still provides a good estimate and reasonable accuracy about what communities exist.

Some of the donor-estimated communities for 2022

What we found

You can see the communities for every entity in the OCPF data from 2021 to 2023, in total and broken down by year (free with email signup). We anticipate that if you’re reading this, you’re enough of an expert on Massachusetts politics to find interesting tidbits in the results, but here are some things, in no particular order, that jumped out to us.

1. There are multiple communities for each party. Rather than one Democratic community and one Republican, there are a large number for each. This helps us find more granularity in the parties than we could get from simply from voting records and see who the donors find to be similar candidates.

2. There is one large community that includes many of the Democrats in the State House. In 2022, for examples, Community 1, which includes Lt. Gov. candidate Kim Driscoll, Senate President Karen Spilka, and Speaker Ron Mariano, has 308 members, compared to 87 members for the next largest group, comprised of progressive Democrats.

3. There are three Republican communities, despite the Massachusetts Republican Party being usually seen as Trump vs Baker Republicans. Instead, Anthony Amore and Chris Doughty were in one, Geoff Diehl and the State Committee in another, and Bradley Jones and Bruce Tarr in the third.

4. Gov. Maura Healey is part of a smaller group which, surprisingly, includes legislators representing East Boston, former Sen. Joseph Boncore, Sen. Lydia Edwards, and Rep. Adrian Madaro.

5. For 2021, the Boston mayoral and council candidates were split among different groups that don’t necessarily translate to the perceived ideological differences. Some of the candidates that are seen as the more conservative fell into the same category as most statewide Democrats, while others were in groups that didn’t have any other Boston candidates, like Kendra Lara, who was grouped with a number of Somerville City Council candidates. The groupings for some of the candidates were:

   1. Erin Murphy, Bridget Nee-Walsh, Ed Flynn, Frank Baker, Brian Worrell, Mary Tamer, Kenzie Bok, Liz Breadon

   2. Michelle Wu, Julia Mejia, Ruthzee Louijeune, David Halbert, Carla Monteiro, Ricardo Arroyo;

   3. Anissa Essaibi-George, Andrea Campbell, Michael Flaherty

   4. Kim Janey, Alexander Grey

   5. Lydia Edwards

   6. Kendra Lara

   7. Tania Fernandes-Anderson

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.