The Urban-Rural Divide of Presidential Finance

• In Event: How Campaign Finance Players Adapt to Maintain Influence

Abstract

For most of the period following the McGovern-Fraser reforms, presidential campaigns have typically relied on direct contributions to their official campaign organizations or public funding (Brown, Powell, and Wilcox 1995; Hinkley and Green 1996; Francia et al. 2006). Recent federal court decisions and FEC rulings have allowed political action committees (PACs) to participate more directly in the political process leading to increased fundraising and spending by these groups (Dowling and Miller 2014) and in many cases these groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, which produced the phenomena of super PACs. Although super PACs are not legally allowed to coordinate their efforts with any of the electoral candidates, they do have the potential to provide a tremendous amount of indirect support through electioneering communications (Smith and Powell 2013; Dawood 2015) while diminishing the role of the direct donors and political parties (Primo and Milyo 2020). Previous work has documented how parties and candidates raise their funds from the same pool of cash (Brown, Powell, and Wilcox 1995; Hinkley and Green 1996; Francia et al. 2006) in narrow regions of the country (Brown, Powell, and Wilcox 1995; Gimpel, Lee, and Kaminski 2006; Sebold et al. 2012). Yet, we know less about where super PACs are soliciting their funds. Using Federal Election Commission finance records from the 2016 and 2020 presidential cycles we measure the contributions to presidential committees and super PACs at the zip code level to determine if there are certain geographical areas that contribute to these groups, and to the extent to which the relationship presents differences in political, economic, or social factors. While recent previous work (Gimpel, Lee, and Kaminski 2006; Mitchell, Sebold, Dowdle, Limbocker, and Stewart 2015) demonstrated that individual contributions to campaigns have a narrow geographic spread, we find that contributions to super PACs are concentrated in even more relatively isolated “islands” of wealth. We also find the differences presented in the geographical origins of contributions to the candidate committees versus Super PACs is supported by the differences in political, economic, and social factors present.

Authors

• Karen Denice Sebold, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

• Joshua L. Mitchell, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

• Andrew J. Dowdle, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville