Infographic: US campaign finances revealed | Hacker News Reader

Infographic: US campaign finances revealed

aljazeera.com

53 pointsl33tbro29 comments

Just to put these numbers into perspective, something the infographic fails to do even though it slaps on the label "Big Money", Americans spend 15x more on pet food than both political candidates and parties combined spend on political speech.

http://www.petfoodinstitute.org/Index.cfm?Page=USPetFoodSale...

I don't know why comparing political donations to food puts these numbers in perspective. A better comparison is other nations fundraising.

Canadians spend less on campaigns than the "biggest spenders" on that chart combined, with 37 million citizens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in_...

During the 2010 presidential election Brazilians spent $2 billion on campaigns and have ~200 million citizens.

http://articles.cnn.com/2012-01-24/world/world_global-campai...

Because pets are a luxury, but political participation is a necessity for the country to work properly.

Political donations are not a necessity for the country to work properly.

Pets may be a luxury, but once you have them feeding them is arguably a necessity. What's missing is whether they are buying more luxurious food than necessary.

Anyway, in the end it's a completely arbitrary comparison.

Point taken about having to feed them once you have them.

And I agree that political donations are not a necessity, but only if donations are banned, which is not the case. If your opponents are getting donations, then you are at a net loss if you don't. In that sense, being idealistic does not get you supporters, and donations really are necessary.

Feeding pets isn't a luxury. Without food, they die.

From this tiny sample, it appears that the US is fairly average.

Has anyone compiled a fuller list of per capita campaign costs by country? I could find none.

Americans spend about 2x more on Halloween candy ($2.2B)

That money will be spread rather evenly over the population such that everyone spends some small amount. What's scary about the political donations is that small groups of people with particular interests spend vast amounts of money; it's this part of the comparison that matters, not the total sum.

Yet another example of "Hot Topic" Data Journalism.

All of the "infographics" that are made this way break the web, and are hostile to verifying the facts that they are claiming.

News orgs, please for the love of Journalism, stop making these.

Can you expand on what you mean by "break the web"?

What I guess he means is that the content is not readily indexed by search engines, and does not have a fluid layout which adapts to different screen sizes such as with normal text. And perhaps the absence of linked sources.

Is it me, or are the proportions of a least the first graphic off?

Here are the data is in Wolfram|Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(0,+654.6),+(0,+536.3). I don't think W|A supports bar charts for some reason.

Edward Tufte would not be pleased.

  654.6 / 536.3 = 1.22
  232px / 195px = 1.19

So I read a little bit more about Open Secrets on their website, and they spare no detail in explaining what their data is used for. But does it say anywhere how they get their data? If so, could someone kindly point it out for me?

I would think that they simply compile reports from other places, but am curious nonetheless.

The data comes from the Federally mandated campaign finance reports. See http://www.fec.gov/disclosure.shtml

So the data comes from the candidates themselves and the data is heavily scrutinized for accuracy.

Thanks!

Unusually, this is a ~good~ infographic!

And a depressing one, at that!

I wonder how much money would have to be raised before everyone acknowledged this is not even close to democracy and political leaders are just being bought.

i.e. Next election a Super PAC backed by health insurance companies spends $20 Billion for the candidate they want.

Surely this can't go on.

Huh. As a non-American I was under the impression that the Romney camp was significantly out-spending Obama.

What do the numbers look like if you add the earlier spending by the various Republican presidential candidates?

This impression may come from the money being spent supporting Romney by 'unaffiliated' Super PACs.

Aha. This is almost certainly the reason I was thinking that.

Many organizations (both SuperPACs and "charities") aren't included there. It's believed that Republican groups are probably out-spending Democratic ones but because a lot of that advertising is done by groups that are supposed to be charities, they don't have to reveal what they spent or where they got the money from.

Incumbents usually have an easier time raising money. They already have contacts from the first campaign just a few years ago. And I don't have any hard data but I was under the opposite impression.

Interesting, but the text is so blurry I can't read it half the time.

Very interesting, I have only one nitpick (maybe for the paranoid only) : why not show the cumulative distribution but pick 200$ as a threshold?

There is something about Morgan Freeman giving $1m to the Obama campaign that I find comical, but I can't figure out why.

Maybe because he played a US president in a movie about a meteor hitting the Earth?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com