providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world

Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode

2.04.2008

What Party are Creatives Supporting for President?


The Huffington Post has a fundraising exploration tool that uses Google's API to visually map donations to political candidates, and it provided me with a whole evening of fun (which explains why it's a good thing I'm married and not out trying to pick up a future mate). After virtually stalking my neighbors to see who was giving to Mitt Romney and who was giving to Barack Obama, I noticed that I could search donations by occupation. I entered in a few occupations in the creative field: "graphic designer", "creative director", "web developer", and so on. It was very illuminating. More importantly, this query provided me with a nice little dataset to make infographics out of. And now you can enjoy them too. (Click on any graphic to enlarge to about 1280 pixels wide)



The first chart takes the raw amounts of cash donated to Democrat and Republican candidates for president, grouped first by party donated to, and segmented within those groups by occupation. You can see that creatives are donating overwhelmingly to the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. In raw dollar amounts, it's about two to one. And look at those photographers! Man, they (meaning, in part, me) must be getting paid way too much to be giving all that dough out (actually, it's due to the larger number of photographers that donate, relative to other occupations).



So, now we know that creatives seem to support Dems over the GOP. But that brought me to a finer point: if you are, say, an art director, are you more likely to give to a Democrat or to a Republican? Remember, the first chart simply shows the total amount given. Within each party's breakdown, you get a feel for total amounts given by production artists versus ad execs, for example, but remember, there might be just one or two P.A.'s giving money, and a whole lot of ad-men donating, skewing the relative data. That's what brings me to the next set of graphics:

The second and third graphics show the relative amounts given by each occupation to Democrats and Republicans. The numbers are standardized to the largest pool of donors (those profligate photographers)at a 1:1 ratio between Dem-donating shooters and GOP-loving imagemakers. Now we can use the data to estimate if you are more likely to give to Clinton or to McCain, if you are an illustrator:



The third graphic overlays the data blobs for each occupation's Democrat and Republican donors, to help visually compare relative giving preferences. Which do you think works better?


One analysis suggests that art directors and photographers tend to be the most split groups, with nearly equal likelihood that you would give cash to either party. It also shows that we need to pay illustrators and production artists a hell of a lot more money before they give some of it away to candidates (or they are just really smart and spend the cash on more important things, like beer and espresso).

One thing this proportional representation doesn't factor in are the total number of donors for republicans versus democrats. Obviously, if there was just one Republican donor for each occupation (and they gave a lot of money), the relative charts above wouldn't work. But in general terms, I think it's a nice representation (this is why I am an information presenter and not a pure statistician...if you can give me figures adjusted for total number of donors, send it to me and I'll make new graphics!)

So, that's my two cents before Super Tuesday. Now: no matter who you support, go and make your voice heard and GO VOTE!

Labels: , , , , ,


posted at 5:12 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

Leave your comments here: 0 comments


Business Blog Top Sites
Subscribe with Bloglines
View Alan Bucknam's profile on LinkedIn

Add to Technorati Favorites