# Votes and Spending, Part 2: Spending through the ages

March 19, 2016

I previously found that at large democratic city council candidates who spend more money in the cycle prior to the primary generally receive a larger fraction of votes With the exception of one candidate who received a large fraction of votes though he claimed to have no expenditures. We will find similar occurrences in this analysis . Here I extend the same analysis to two additional city council election cycles for which I could easily acquire data. I find a similar pattern when particularly when standardized within year to account for campaign spending related inflation. Note, many regulatory changes occurred over the time span of the analysis.

## Voting data, 2007, 2011, and 2015

We begin with loading and combining the voting data. At the end of this section we’ll have a list of the candidates grouped by election year with the number and percentage of votes they each got.

First, I that the column names across the elections are the same. They differ in 2015, so I renamed the columns of that year to match the others. Then to each data frame I added a year column. I also checked the label for the At Large Democratic Council election and found it changed between 2007 and 2011.

Total number of votes in 2007: 709720
Total number of votes in 2011: 477008
Total number of votes in 2015: 644038


With an incumbent mayor running for reelection in 2011, it’s not too surprising to find a lower turnout. Next, let’s collect and sort the finance data.

## Campaign finance data, 2007, 2011, and 2015

As before, I need to remove amended lines to cut back on counting duplicated entries.

The finance data has matching columns for each year. As before, I use hand made tags based on unique values in the FilerName column and match those up to the candidate names from the voting data. This was a little tedious and is subject to the usual sorts of human error/inaccuracy. Even without those errors, the routing of money through PACs makes this especially difficult because it is hard to know from this data alone which candidate each PAC supported. For instance, an expense description of “media” or “consulting” or “GOTV” does not describe which candidate the PAC supported. Since I can not track down every political ad or GOTV worker, I restricted the tags to only committees and candidate names I can readily identify with a name on the ballot There are many other data problems too. Many PACs and candidates simply do not file. .

The cell above selects out only the cycle 3 data for those candidates/tags. The below cell selects only the expenditures.

Total spending by Dem city council candidates cycle 3 2007: 862083.07
Total spending by Dem city council candidates cycle 3 2011: 979575.49
Total spending by Dem city council candidates cycle 3 2015: 2675434.78


Interestingly, more money was spent in the 2011 election than the 2007 election though fewer votes were cast.

Below I create expenditure dataframes for each year with a new column that contains the name for that filer based on the corresponding name from the ballot.

The next cell is the big step of combining voter data and expenditure data. To the dataframe with voter percentages (cgroup_sum), I add the expenditure data. This is probably not the technically cleanest way to do this using Pandas.

0 2007 ANDREW TOY 41654 0.058691 NaN
1 2007 BENJAMIN RAMOS 47343 0.066707 NaN
2 2007 BILL GREEN 62252 0.087713 310426.25
3 2007 BLONDELL REYNOLDS BROWN 51846 0.073051 46252.27
4 2007 CARYN HUNT 18723 0.026381 2424.00
5 2007 DEREK S GREEN 30745 0.043320 1633.88
6 2007 HARRY MASSELE 17102 0.024097 5548.00
7 2007 JAMES F KENNEY 95389 0.134404 60373.91
8 2007 JUAN F RAMOS 44205 0.062285 112865.97
9 2007 MACEO CUMMINGS 9577 0.013494 NaN
10 2007 MARC STIER 25078 0.035335 NaN
11 2007 MATT RUBEN 19946 0.028104 32565.07
12 2007 MICHAEL K ELLIS 15254 0.021493 NaN
13 2007 RODNEY LITTLE 9029 0.012722 3775.61
14 2007 SHARIF T STREET 47879 0.067462 78654.59
15 2007 T MILTON STREET SR 10468 0.014749 NaN
16 2007 W WILSON GOODE JR 79798 0.112436 49092.96
17 2007 WILLIAM K GREENLEE 63563 0.089561 141561.00
18 2007 WILSON ALEXANDER 19807 0.027908 NaN
19 2007 Write In 62 0.000087 NaN
20 2011 ANDREW TOY 39467 0.082739 194439.13
21 2011 BILL GREEN 65034 0.136337 270335.06
22 2011 BLONDELL REYNOLDS BROWN 66334 0.139063 117218.36
23 2011 EDWARD J NESMITH 16674 0.034955 100000.00
24 2011 HUMBERTO PEREZ 11211 0.023503 NaN
25 2011 ISAIAH THOMAS 31515 0.066068 NaN
26 2011 JAMES F KENNEY 46282 0.097026 145385.94
27 2011 JANIS E MANSON 8100 0.016981 NaN
28 2011 LAWRENCE P CLARK 11671 0.024467 NaN
29 2011 MICHAEL JONES 23234 0.048708 NaN
30 2011 RALPH P BLAKNEY 10482 0.021974 4761.50
31 2011 SHERRIE COHEN 44528 0.093349 96252.33
32 2011 W WILSON GOODE JR 47225 0.099003 NaN
33 2011 WILLIAM K GREENLEE 55175 0.115669 50009.69
34 2011 Write In 76 0.000159 NaN
35 2015 ALLAN DOMB 57691 0.089577 1546447.86
36 2015 BLONDELL REYNOLDS BROWN 62922 0.097699 7500.20
37 2015 CARLA M CAIN 17115 0.026575 280.00
38 2015 DEREK S GREEN 68505 0.106368 92689.04
39 2015 ED NEILSON 40786 0.063329 60258.56
40 2015 FRANK RIZZO 26260 0.040774 12121.19
41 2015 HELEN GYM 49270 0.076502 225899.67
42 2015 ISAIAH THOMAS 48000 0.074530 107939.81
43 2015 JENNE AYERS 32637 0.050676 7979.35
44 2015 MARNIE AUMENT LOUGHREY 10890 0.016909 NaN
45 2015 PAUL STEINKE 37104 0.057612 147315.94
46 2015 SHERRIE COHEN 45847 0.071187 194089.34
47 2015 THOMAS WYATT 30310 0.047062 195789.44
48 2015 W WILSON GOODE JR 46555 0.072286 NaN
49 2015 WILLIAM K GREENLEE 50849 0.078953 76591.44
50 2015 WILSON ALEXANDER 19210 0.029827 532.94
51 2015 Write In 87 0.000135 NaN

From this it appears many candidates either did not file their campaign finances for the 3rd cycle or they did not report any expenses during that cycle. I will address that at the end of this post again, but for now those entries will get dropped.

There’s a trend already, however to really compare data across years we can standardize the data within each year to get z scores.

        |  scaled fit [m, b]     |   raw fit [m, b]:
2007    [ 0.02491769  0.06346129][ 0.03445275 -0.08916387]
2011    [ 0.02566051  0.09013895][ 0.05030968 -0.1570854 ]
2015    [ 0.01458749  0.06504785][ 0.0144761 -0.0011184]


Scaling the data brings the fits more into line with each other across years. Interestingly, the returns to spending seem to be lowest this past year when overall spending grew by so much. Furthermore, a more complete model would encapsulate the fact that the sum of all candidate votes fraction must be 1.

Finally, as mentioned before. Many candidates seem to not have listed any expenditures or even filed for the cycle. If we include their voter returns on the plots above by putting their percentages on the left y axis, then the model is clearly broken.