By Adam Pagnucco.
In Part One, we found that 72% of all contributions received by Congressional District 6 candidates were made by individuals (aside from the candidates themselves). Today, we will discuss where these individuals live.
Records from the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) list addresses for individual donors. There is an important exception: the FEC only requires a contribution to be itemized if it “exceeds $200 or aggregates over $200 when added to other contributions received from the same source during the election cycle.” That means small contributions are often not reported individually and therefore do not have associated geographic information.
This is actually a big deal when analyzing these candidates as many of them have not itemized a significant amount of their contributions. The chart below shows the percentage of total contributions accounted for by unitemized individual contributions by candidate. Democrats appear in blue bars and Republicans appear in red ones.
A quick note on Neil Parrott, the GOP’s 2022 nominee who is considering entering the race again. His total raised reported by the FEC in aggregate data is $34,638 but his raw FEC records only contain $33,731 in contributions. I can’t explain the discrepancy but it only accounts for 2.6% of his fundraising.
The queen of small contributions is Democrat Tekesha Martinez, the Mayor of Hagerstown. She reported receiving $114,146 in unitemized contributions, or 76% of her total fundraising. Only two other candidates cracked $40k on this measure: Democratic Delegate Joe Vogel ($42,278) and Republican Mariela Roca ($41,471), who ran and lost in the primary last year. So in analyzing candidate contribution geography, it’s important to remember that we can only assess itemized contributions, giving at best a partial picture.
That said, the chart below shows candidate receipts from itemized contributions of Maryland residents.
Republican Tom Royals is the runaway leader here, with $78,420 in itemized Maryland resident contributions. That’s 49% of his contributions. For the entire field, just 19% of total fundraising came from itemized individuals in Maryland, 30% came from out-of-state individuals and 23% came from unitemized individual contributions.
For the six candidates who raised at least $100,000, here are their percentages of total fundraising accounted for by itemized contributions from Maryland residents.
Republican Tom Royals: 49%
Republican Mariela Roca: 33%
Democrat Lesley Lopez: 32%
Democrat Joe Vogel: 6%
Democrat Tekesha Martinez: 5% (but remember her huge volume of unitemized contributions)
Democrat Geoffrey Grammer: 4%
We will look at in-district fundraising in Part Three.