Individual contributions to 2008 presidential campaigns — from where are candidates drawing their support?

A heckuva lot is being written these days about the blockbuster or lackluster fundraising performance of the presidential hopefuls, as well as, in the cases of Obama and Clinton, the numbers of individuals giving to their campaigns. It seems strange, though, that little has been said about where the individual support for each candidate is coming from.

The FortiusOne data team decided to see what they could find on this question, and discovered some data from the FEC on total campaign contributions raised from individuals, by zip code, in the fourth quarter of last year.

After a less-than-straightforward processing effort, the team created a shapefile from this data and loaded it into GeoCommons, where the GIS-challenged like myself can then have at it. I created a couple of heatmaps to see from where Republican candidates John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are drawing their grassroots support.

Not surprisingly, the map below shows that most of Guiliani’s individual contributors for Q4 ’06 live in New York City, with another cluster in Dallas.

McCain’s Q4 ’06 individual support, in contrast, is coming from a much more geographically diverse base, as you can see on the next map.

We have just begun to tap the surface of the FEC data, and are hoping to get maps of Clinton, Obama and Romney’s individual contributor support bases next. It will be cool to look at these alongside the demographics of their support bases too. So, stay tuned for more on the geography of campaign finance!