A closer look at finance reports: Elected officials

In addition to contributions from PACs, there was another class of donor that I thought was worth highlighting: Elected officials and candidates for public office. Basically, the idea is to see who “the establishment” is supporting, to see what we might learn from that. So without further ado, here’s a Google spreadsheet with all the details, as before sorted by both donor and recipient. Some notes:

– I only counted current candidates and officeholders. There are numerous donations in these reports from former (and possibly future) officeholders/candidates, such as Sylvia Garcia and Peter Brown, but I drew the line at current incumbency and candidacy.

– Also not included, partly because I wasn’t sure I’d recognize them all, were appointed officials. I saw a few – Janiece Longoria and Kase Lawal from the Port Commission, and J. Kent Friedman from the Sports Authority, all showed up multiple times – and probably missed many more. Unfortunately, having all this data in individual PDFs makes that kind of detailed analysis a lot harder to do.

– As with PACs, it should come as no surprise to learn that incumbent council members were the main beneficiaries, receiving about 75% of the donations from other politicians. Again, everyone likes to back a winner, and incumbents almost always win. And again, as open seat races sort themselves out, expect to see more involvement in them.

– It’s clear that CM Jolanda Jones knew going into this election that she had an arduous task ahead of her, and in keeping with that she tapped into the broadest network, receiving donations from ten different elected officials. CM Melissa Noriega was next with five; no other incumbent received more than three. Among non-incumbents, Larry Green in K (four) and Ellen Cohen in C (three) were the leaders.

– On the flip side, State Rep. Garnet Coleman was the most frequent giver, donating to nine different incumbents. He was an equal opportunity contributor, donating to five Democrats (Bradford, Gonzalez, Jones, Rodriguez, and Adams) and four Republicans (Costello, Stardig, Pennington, and Sullivan). Justice of the Peace Zinetta Burney was the next most frequent with five contributions, all Democrats: Bradford, Rodriguez, Jones, Adams, and Larry Green.

– The contributions listed from Ellen Cohen and Kristi Thibaut to themselves are transfers from their State Rep campaign accounts. Mayoral candidate Fernando Herrera was also a candidate for State Rep in 2010, but he did not list any such transfer, which I found curious since he listed more than twice as much in expenditures ($9206) as he did in contributions ($4550) and still claimed $3334 on hand despite having filed no report in January and claiming no loans. Leftover cash from his prior candidacy is the most logical source for the discrepancy, but if so he did not document this.

– The other curiosity about this class of contributor, which I have mentioned before, is the generosity of At Large #2 candidate Eric Dick, who gave a total of $640 to five candidates – Cohen, Jones, Green, Noriega, and District B candidate Phillip Paul Bryant, who received by far the biggest donation of $500. As we will see in a subsequent post, Dick did not limit his giving to city races. Among other candidates, Jack Christie donated to three campaigns (Hoang, Noriega, Sullivan), and Jenifer Pool to two (Gonzalez and Adams). CM Stephen Costello was the only Council member to donate to his colleagues, making contributions to CMs Noriega and Gonzalez.

– To be honest, I expected there to be more of this type of donation. Perhaps the 30 day and 8 day reports will be more in line with what I thought would be the case. If I had the capability, I’d love to expand this analysis to include all of the people who show up on multiple finance reports. You really do see the same names over and over again.

Starting with the next post in this series, I’ll take a look at expenditures. Let me know what you think.

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