January 18, 2016

This analysis combines two data sources: campaign finance data and election results from the city commissioner. The finance data does not contain perfect infromation. The current filing system does not appear to check for consistency in spelling across filings, nor does it require all relevant data fields to be completed. Furthermore, there is no standard for keywords for certain types of expenses. For instance, expenses listed as “donations” to Ward committees may actually be in exchange for “get out the vote” work by the committees. These and other shortcomings in the filing system limit the scope of this analysis at present considerably. However, I find a nearly logarithmic relation between expenditures in the filing cycle leading up to the election and the percentage of votes won. Since there is an upper bound of 1 on the voter percentage, it is probably more accurate to call this logistic growth.

Filtering data

Here we focus on cycle 3 to isolate the spending that occured up to the day of the primary. This includes most (though not all) of the get out the vote expenditures. See filing date information.

Total number of entries in YTD campaing filings: 210472
Number of lines in cycle 3 filing: 25537


I am limiting the scope of this analysis to only the Primary for Democratic seats on City Council. I am relying on a hand built table that connects the names of candidates as they appear in the city commissioners’ data with how they appear in entries on campaign finance reports. This table was assembled by the kind people at Philly 3.0 after selecting a unique entry list of FilerNames from the finance data. Note, candidates may have a committee filing name and a personal filing name. I combine personal and committee spending into a single entity, but this may also require removing contributions to a committee so they do not get double counted when summing expenditures.

['idx' 'Filers' 'Party' 'Office Sought' 'District' 'VotesName']


The ‘Filers’ column contains the names on the finance data. ‘VotesName’ column contains the candidates name as found in commissioners voting data.

Number of lines in cycle 3 filing for        Democrats running for city council at large: 2236


So only a small fraction of lines in the original finance data are for the 16 candidates running as Democrats for at large spots on City Council. There are several types of data in the DocType column:

['FilerName' 'Year' 'Cycle' 'DocType' 'EntityName' 'EntityAddressLine1'
'EmployerCity' 'EmployerState' 'EmployerZip' 'Date' 'Amount' 'Description'
'Amended' 'SubDate' 'FiledBy']

Document types:
['Campaign Finance Report (Cover Page)'
'CFR - Schedule I - Part C - Contributions Received From Political Committees (Over $250.00)' 'Campaign Finance Statement' 'CFR - Schedule IV - Statement of Unpaid Depts' 'CFR - Schedule III - Statement of Expenditures' 'CFR - Schedule I - Part E - Other Receipts' 'CFR - Schedule II - Part G - In-Kind Contributions Received (Value Over$250.00)'
'CFR - Schedule II - Part F - In-Kind Contributions Received (Value of $50.01 to$250.00)'
'CFR - Schedule I - Part B - All Other Contributions ($50.01 -$250.00)'
'CFR - Schedule I - Part D - All Other Contributions (Over $250.00)' 'CFR - Schedule I - Part A - Contributions Received From Political Committees ($50.01 to \$250.00)']


Let’s look at just expenditures for now. (Keep reading… this isn’t the actual number.)

Number of expenditures by all dem at large city council candidates during cycle 3: 1081
Total spending by those candidates: 2910301.4


This is not an unbelievable number, but it seemed high to me. I took a peak inside the actual data and found many lines are duplicated when the Amended column is marked yes. It appears the Year-To-Date data keeps all filing submissions including those that are amended. So I wrote the following function to filter out the amended lines.

Number of expenditures by all dem at large city council candidates during cycle 3: 909
Total spending by those candidates: 2675434.78


Not much lower, but that’s the best I can discern for now.
Let’s filter the voting data now and compute the voter percentages.

Total number of votes: 643951
VOTE  VOTE_PCT
CANDIDATE
MARNIE AUMENT LOUGHREY   10890  0.016911
CARLA M CAIN             17115  0.026578
WILSON ALEXANDER         19210  0.029831
FRANK RIZZO              26260  0.040780
THOMAS WYATT             30310  0.047069
JENNE AYERS              32637  0.050682
PAUL STEINKE             37104  0.057619
ED NEILSON               40786  0.063337
SHERRIE COHEN            45847  0.071196
W WILSON GOODE JR        46555  0.072296
ISAIAH THOMAS            48000  0.074540
HELEN GYM                49270  0.076512
WILLIAM K GREENLEE       50849  0.078964
ALLAN DOMB               57691  0.089589
BLONDELL REYNOLDS BROWN  62922  0.097712
DEREK S GREEN            68505  0.106382


This is consistent with the voter percentages on the city commisioners website .

Analysis part 1

Let’s see what’s in the description of those expenditures.

Credit Card Processing Fee    108
Election Day Salary           101
Election Day Expenses          45
GOTV field work                44
Donation                       37
GOTV                           36
Salary                         25
Parking                        22
Consulting                     22
Election Day field             21
Contribution                   21
Printing                       19
Office Supplies                11
Election Day                   10
Gas                             7
Mail & Media Services           7
Contribution Refund             7
Campaign Materials              6
Field Expenses                  6
Taxi                            5
Stipend                         5
Service Fee                     5
Payroll                         4
Name: Description, dtype: int64


There are a lot of questions one could ask. The value_counts function matches values exactly, so differences in capitalization will create new lines. And there are many other entries that probably mean identitical things, e.g., “GOTV” and “GOTV field work” and probably “Election Day Salary”. It’s hard to say given the current filing system.

Add Voter data tag to campaign finances

In playing with the data some at this point, I noticed a couple of Council Candidates are missing data… Marnie Aument Loughrey did not file a cycle 3 report at all. This is consistent with the absence of a folder with her name in the directory at: ftp://ftp.phila-records.com/2015/Cycle%203/ I also found W. Wilson Goode Jr. had no expenses in cycle 3 according to his report. They wil be excluded from the plots below.

VOTE VOTE_PCT Expense
CANDIDATE
ALLAN DOMB 57691 0.089589 1546447.86
BLONDELL REYNOLDS BROWN 62922 0.097712 7500.20
CARLA M CAIN 17115 0.026578 280.00
DEREK S GREEN 68505 0.106382 92689.04
ED NEILSON 40786 0.063337 60258.56
FRANK RIZZO 26260 0.040780 12121.19
HELEN GYM 49270 0.076512 225899.67
ISAIAH THOMAS 48000 0.074540 107939.81
JENNE AYERS 32637 0.050682 7979.35
MARNIE AUMENT LOUGHREY 10890 0.016911 NaN
PAUL STEINKE 37104 0.057619 147315.94
SHERRIE COHEN 45847 0.071196 194089.34
THOMAS WYATT 30310 0.047069 195789.44
W WILSON GOODE JR 46555 0.072296 NaN
WILLIAM K GREENLEE 50849 0.078964 76591.44
WILSON ALEXANDER 19210 0.029831 532.94

Ok, one candidate (Alan Domb) outspent the next candidate by a factor of 10.

Well… that’s a pretty substanial return to dollars spent overall and I suspect the spending sums for some of those points is inaccurate (low).
There is much more that can be discovered in this data as Tom Ferrick has pointed out.