Who Runs Philly? Part 8: Where does the money come from?

Who Runs Philly? is an ongoing project from Philly Power Research focused on highlighting the powerful people, organizations, businesses, and interest groups that shape Philadelphia. As part of this project, we’re creating tools that allow you to easily explore publicly available campaign finance data on your own. This tool helps you see where campaign money comes from. To explore donor data, check out our tool: The Philadelphia Campaign Finance Data Explorer.

• The contributions map is a geographic map of political donations from Philadelphia neighborhoods and city council districts with a stacked graph of contributions from US counties by employment sector.  The contributions data is the same data driving the Campaign Finance Data Explorer.

You can filter by candidate to see which neighborhoods have contributed most to their campaigns [usage example].

 At the bottom of the map is a graph showing which US counties candidates received donations from [usage example].  You can also explore contributions by neighborhood in graph form.

Some Ideas to Explore:

• Which neighborhoods and council districts give the most?

• Do district council people raise money within the districts they represent?

• Which candidates have raised more than half of their money from outside Philly?

• Who got the most money from your neighborhood?

Be sure to select your neighborhood and year range from the drop down menu on the right.

Methodology
Addresses that are in contribution data included in the Campaign Finance Data Explorer were geocoded using Google’s Geocoding API and those latitude, longitude points where determined to be within both the PASDA “Philadelphia Neighborhood” polygons and the Philadelphia City Council District boundaries and contribution numbers aggregated within those boundaries.  Approximately 800 contribution entries failed geocoding and are not included in the map.