Help me find the FUN in fundraising

May 7, 2009 9:19 AM

[Lack_of_Data_Filter] Democratic Senators and Members of Congress travel to New York City on national fundraising trips very often, where they meet with wealthy people, attend fundraisers hosted by friends/acquaintances, etc.. How can I find out how much money they tend to raise on an average trip to NYC?

Even if it is a ballpark estimate, I'm dying for SOMETHING.

posted by AlbatrossJones to law & government (2 comments total)

You probably can't. There aren't any rules which require the disclosure of this sort of thing.

Your best bet is to check OpenSecrets and see how much of their funding comes from sources associated with New York City. That wouldn't give you anything like a per-trip average--I doubt you can easily find out how many times a given candidate has a fundraising trip; I don't think anyone keeps records of that--but it would give you pretty accurate idea of how much of their finding comes from the city.
posted by valkyryn at 10:30 AM on May 7

Seconding valkyryn. Generally the only way you can know how much an individual event raised is through press accounts, though any numbers you find that way will be from the campaign, and subject to normal caveats. (There are all sorts of ways to make a fundraiser look more impressive than it was.)

Another possibility would be, if you knew specific fundraiser dates, to look at FEC disclosure forms for donations which correlate with those dates. The problem there, though, is that people often mail in checks - or, more commonly these days, give online - in advance, or even afterwards. So looking at specific dates will almost certainly skew things far too low.

Finally, I don't think you can really look at "averages." Some MoCs do galas at the Waldorf with Bill Clinton as the guest of honor; others do low-dollar fundraisers at bars hosted by local grassroots groups. In other words, there are probably huge disparities in terms of what your average elected official takes in on a given night of fundraising in Gotham.

Is there a particular reason you're seeking this data? If we knew, it might help to guide other, more attainable searches for data.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 1:06 PM on May 7