October 31, 2008
How The Chronicle Compiled Its Review of Campaign Contributions
By Suzanne Perry and Grant Williams
For The Chronicle’s study of campaign contributions in the charitable world, the Center for Responsive Politics applied methods that it uses to track political giving in a wide range of professions. The methods involve combing the campaign-disclosure forms that are required by the Federal Election Commission for contributions of $200 or more, and applying a variety of codes to identify contributors, recipients, and political parties.
The center has tracked the flow of money to politicians and political committees since 1983, supported by grants from organizations including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts.
Giving by both employees and their immediate family members is examined. If a spouse or child appears to have no source of income separate from that of the family’s main contributor, his or her donation is counted as well. For example, donations by Edythe Broad — who founded the Broad Foundations with her husband, Eli — are included in this analysis even though she usually listed her occupation on disclosure forms as “homemaker.”
Name Variations
The Chronicle asked the center to examine the giving records of individuals who work for a specific group of organizations — the 25 wealthiest foundations in the United States and the top 75 organizations on The Chronicle’s 2007 annual list of the 400 charities (excluding universities and hospitals) that raised the most money from private sources. The results cover contributions made since January 1, 2007, the beginning of the current election cycle, through the end of August.
The research project was complicated by difficulties in the way donations are reported to the Federal Election Commission. The Chronicle learned of a few cases in which people who were listed as foundation employees had left the organizations before January 1, 2007; the campaigns that reported the donations had apparently not updated their records.
Donors (or the campaigns) also sometimes listed different full names or different occupations for the same person, making it harder to track their total contributions. For example, it was difficult to distinguish between Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and his father, William Gates Sr., a co-chair of the foundation, in the federal records. Bill Gates is variously listed as William Gates, William H. Gates III, and William H. Gates Jr., and as chairman of Microsoft, entrepreneur, and Gates Foundation co-chair. Foundations sometimes show up in federal records under their full names and sometimes under abbreviations (for example, “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” or “Gates Foundation,” “Andrew W. Mellon Foundation” or “A.W. Mellon Foundation”).
While such complications may have produced imprecise numbers in some cases, other data reinforce the finding that charity and foundation campaign contributors favor Democrats by a large margin. For example, since the 1990 election cycle the Center for Responsive Politics has tracked a category it labels “nonprofits, foundations, and philanthropists.” That category excludes nonprofit groups that focus on a single issue — for example, environmental, health, human-rights, and women’s groups, among others, which are tracked separately, while it includes donations from political-action committees that are operated by nonprofit advocacy groups.
In all, 76 percent of the $12.3-million in donations in that category went to Democrats during this election cycle, and 73 percent of all donations since 1990.
In other categories that are likely to include a large number of nonprofit groups, a high percentage of donations to Democrats showed up among women’s-issues groups (97 percent), environmental groups (92 percent), and human-rights groups (86 percent). Employees and political-action committees of anti-abortion groups gave 99 percent of their donations to Republicans, but those of abortion-rights groups gave 91 percent to Democrats. (Data for other professions can be found on the center’s Web site.)
In data compiled for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the center found that college administrators and professors contributed eight times as much money to Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic contender, as to Sen. John McCain, the Republican ($12.2-million to $1.5 million).
Because this is the first time the Center for Responsive Politics has examined donations by employees of large charities and foundations, it is unknown how giving patterns compare with those of previous elections. Several people interviewed by The Chronicle of Philanthropy said the preference for Senator Obama among those employees mirrored that of the general population. Indeed, Senator Obama has raised more money than Senator McCain — $603-million, or 63 percent, of the $961-million that had been raised by the two presidential campaigns through the end of September, according to the center
But that proportion is not as high as in the charitable world, where contributions favored Senator Obama by more than 12 to 1, according to the center’s study for The Chronicle.
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