Giving by Occupation (various)

Previously, we described our FEC research into itemized donations by individuals to campaigns for House, Senate, and President, and which were filed during the calendar year 2020. The map we demonstrated in that post is in a style we call “king of the hill” in that it shows you the winner between different lines within a precinct. Ideal for election returns, it reflects competition and the magnitude of the marginal win itself is encoded in the shading. For those maps, we only showed you ZIP areas where both Democratic and Republican giving was found, in order to hide baseline noise and highlight contrast.

Here is a different mapping style indeed, where we separate partisan giving, and compare the local magnitude of each. The top pair of maps are for the occupation of “Retired” whereas the lower pair are of the term “Not Employed.”

Though these mean fundamentally similar things, each occupational term has a markedly partisan cast to it.

Here is a pair of maps reflecting a detail on the political giving by donors who list their occupation as CEO. You might not be surprised to find this, but after terms that refer to non-work, CEO is currently measured as the largest-spending occupation in the Federal system, in 2020.

The GOP candidates took **$39,342,528.57** in CEO money, nationwide.

The Dem candidates took $**34,724,691.72** in CEO money, nationwide.

What we’re doing to display magnitude here is a process known as quantization which is where we control how our data values (dollar sums, in this case) are symbolized to viewers. For instance, Democrats are blue and Republicans are red. But we also shade the opacity of each area in a way that maps to the underlying value–this highlights the gradation in values, illuminating where the big money is in these maps.

Attorneys are **$179,770,993.86** Democrat

Attorneys are only $**25,268,941.30** Republican

These two maps share a feature: quantization. Because they have the same quantization, it is easy to see the partisan influx of attorney money to Democrats, relative to the ghost-town of GOP-supportive attorneys. If these maps were quantized based on their own local values, they would not be comparable to each other, but since they are uniformly quantized–like having the same y-scale on a chart, these may be compared side by side to study impact. However, this blog may be breaking the news that the legal profession preferred Democrats to Republicans 7 to 1 in context of their 2020 political engagement.

These techniques let us find another place where that is totally true.