Donor Data Shows Clinton Collecting Checks From Working Class Voters -- And Their Bosses
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About Thomas B. Edsall
Thomas B. Edsall is the political editor of the Huffington Post. He is also Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. From 1981 to 2006, he was a political reporter at the Washington Post. He is the author of Chain Reaction and Building Red America. Tom can be reached at edsall@huffingtonpost.com.
All the focus of late has been on the white working class. Hillary Clinton's decisive victories in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky have pointed to her strength and to Barack Obama's weaknesses among these once-Reagan Democrats, many of whom in 2006 returned to the Democratic fold.
But if you take a look at Huffington Post's Fundrace site to check out who the nation's corporate honchos - CEOs - are putting their money on, you'll find that Clinton is simultaneously the darling of blue collar whites and of their bosses, the folks at the top of the heap.
Taking all donations of $4,600 (the maximum an individual can donate) by self-identified CEOs, Hillary crushes the entire field: she collected $1.05 million from those who like to summer in the Hamptons and winter in Aspen. In contrast, Obama pulled in a paltry $329,000 from this
class. John McCain, the current standard bearer of the party of corporate America, was far, far behind, with $50,600.
Fundrace is a site where you can find out, with ease, to whom your friends and neighbors have made contributions, along with such interesting factoids as:
* Ben Stiller and Bette Midler each gave Clinton $4,600, while Ben Affleck and Matt Damon each gave Obama $4,600, the maximum allowed by law;
* Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward each maxed out to three candidates, Clinton, Obama and Chris Dodd.
Beyond that, there are some broader, intriguing trends to be observed on Fundrace - specifically the impact of Internet-credit card giving on the geographic distribution of donations. Compare the pattern of Democratic and Republican campaign contributions in 2004 and in 2008.
On Fundrace maps showing where donations come from, the blue (Democratic) dots indicating individual contributions in 2004 are limited almost entirely to the East and West Coasts, with very occasional blue spots appearing around Chicago, Denver and just north of Albuquerque. By 2008, blue and purple (signaling contributions from both parties) dots have spread much more extensively from the coasts into middle America.
Fundrace maps of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, in turn, demonstrate a striking pattern of donations to Clinton and McCain and Obama.
All three candidates do well in the upscale suburbs of Mclean and Alexandria, Virginia, and in affluent Potomac and Bethesda, Maryland.
Clinton and Obama reach further than McCain into liberal Montgomery County, Md., and into the District of Columbia. Where Obama stands apart, however - and this is quite dramatic on the map -- is in his fundraising success in the African American suburbs of Maryland's Prince Georges County.
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May 26, 2008 01:35 PM