How Much Have Your Birmingham Neighbors Given to Obama and Romney?
Birmingham residents have donated almost $390,000 to Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, according to an interactive database of campaign contributions from the Federal Election Commission.
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This election cycle, Birmingham residents are giving larger contributions to Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but President Barack Obama is getting more contributions from the city.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Birmingham residents have made 165 donations of $1,000 or more to both presidential campaigns. Of those, 142 were checks to Romney, including 85 contributions over $2,400.
Obama received 23 contributions of at least $1,000. In total, Birmingham residents have contributed almost $390,000 to the candidates.
But where Romney is getting more money per contributor, Obama is getting more contributions. Of the 792 campaign contributions reported from Birmingham residents since May 2011, Obama has received 528 donations versus 264 donations to Romney.
All this information and more can be found in an interactive database from Patch so you can see how much your Birmingham neighbors have donated to the various presidential campaign — and to which candidate they’re writing their checks.
We’ve also included records for many communities across southeastern Michigan, so if you want to see who from Rochester or Brighton contributed to campaigns, go right ahead. You can search by candidate, contributor, city, ZIP code and amount contributed.
It's important to note that while a vote for a candidate is secret, a donation to a campaign is public record and open to public scrutiny. Federal election law requires campaigns to regularly report donations and contributors. The information in the database was downloaded from the Federal Election Commission’s website. The data is based on quarterly reports and is current through July. The FEC data will be updated in mid-October. We'll update this database when new information is available.
HDSA
10:53 am on Tuesday, September 25, 2012
What a staggeringly bad piece of reporting. The reporter is either too lazy to look at the list, or too bias to report accurately. The claim that more people contributed to Obama is patently false. There may have been 528 donations, but John Vanderford accounted for at least half of them in $3 and $5 increments (can only imagine what his scam is,) and a handfull of people account for the rest. Please, Mr. Wyatt, either do your homework, stop twisting the facts, or both.
Don Wyatt
3:52 pm on Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Thanks for the feedback, HDSA. The story is based on a database of contributions, not contributors. So references in the story highlight donations not donators. So the lede of the story says: "This election cycle, Birmingham residents are giving larger contributions to Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but President Barack Obama is getting more contributions from the city." We'll look closer at individuals in the database for an upcoming story.
HDSA
10:29 am on Thursday, September 27, 2012
If the story is based on the database, you should have looked at the database. You thank me for the feedback, yet you don't accept it. I accept that the stroy was about the donations, but surely your basic journalistic eduction would tell you that when you report how many contributions, you are inferring that is how many donators there were. Otherwise, you have just reported a useless fact. If one person made one donation or one hundred, of what substantive knowledge is that? So, I ask you, are you a lazy reporter or a manipulative one? Are you making the news or reporting it poorly? Even your "ledge" doesn't hold water, becuase you didn't bother to add up what the individual donations totaled, which is the only way to compare the size of donations. If, as you say, the size of the donations is the story, then report it. Clearly the increments of donations doesn't matter. One can't steal one million dollars in fifty dollar increments and claim it is not a felony. If you want to be a politician, please go do so. If you wan to be a journalist, please start. It does require intregity.
Don Wyatt
8:15 pm on Thursday, September 27, 2012
Again, thanks for the feedback. We'll look closer at individual contributors and repeat donors in the next post. Stay tuned. In the meantime, dive into the database yourself and let everyone know what you find. We posted the database and put it in to a searchable form so everyone can do their own analysis of the data. Looking forward to seeing what you find.