Thursday, September 13, 2007

Military Donations   [Jonah Goldberg]

Alendalux writes:

Jonah,

 

Variations on this theme have been kicking around for a while – especially the one about Paul’s alleged groundswell of support.  It has also been based on lazy research.  They go to this page at FEC (http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2007/Q2/) which has links to contributions by employer.  But there’s no set way of listing your employer.  Many people put “retired” under employer and then put USN, USMC or USAF next to their name in the name field – the “contributions by employer” does not take this into account.  It also doesn’t take into account the number of donors, just the amount of money.  So what you need to do is go to this FEC page (http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/srssea.shtml) – and choose either Republican or Democrat – which will eventually link you to a page for each candidate where you can get a listing of every individual contribution made to a given candidate.   

When the Paul story came out in July, I wrote about this.  I went through the pages for Paul and McCain, two individuals who have served in the military with completely opposite views on Iraq.  Paul had $23,000 in donations while McCain had $15,000.  Just looking at those numbers you know this is hardly going to be a statistically significant study.  But since so many people want to pretend it is, let’s go along with it.  Doing searches for Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine, USAF, USN, USA, USMC, DOD, Defense, Veteran, Soldier and Military (and, of course making sure anyone that came up on these searches were actually connected to the military – “USA” brought up “Susan” as often as it did someone in the Army), it turns out Paul’s money comes from a total of 23 people, most giving in the $1,000+ range.  McCain had more than twice the number of individual contributors – 55.  They just gave less money.  Why this is the case is up for debate – it could just be because Paul supporters are more activist in general.  

But the point is, in terms of numbers, if you can take anything from these findings, it’s that McCain has more support than Paul among those connected with the military who have given money – much more support.  After reading Orr’s post, I went back through both Paul and McCain’s contributions again today.  McCain still has more than twice the number of contributors as Paul, and he’s actually gained more individual contributors than Paul in the intervening two months.  McCain now has 64 to Paul’s 30.  So make of that what you will.  I think it is pretty statistically insignificant, but if you want to play their game, it means the military is still overwhelmingly on the side of the policies supported by McCain.  I haven’t gone through Obama’s contributors yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the people putting this study together took the similar route of taking the conveniently supplied “Contribution by Employer” numbers that showed Paul with some huge groundswell of support. 

09/13 04:44 PMShare