Clean Elections Small ($5) Donors

Public Campaign collected data on Arizona’s $5 donors from a number of sources. Candidates have the option of filing this information with the Arizona Secretary of State’s office through either paper reports or electronically.

• Janet Napolitano 2002, Betsey Bayless (R) 2002, Alfredo Gutierrez (D) 2002, Richard Mahoney (I) 2002, Mark Osterloh (D) 2002, Carol Springer (R) 2002. The Arizona Clean Elections Institute provided us with these data, which it had previously collected for its 2004 report, “Reclaiming Democracy in Arizona: How Clean Elections has expanded the universe of campaign contributors.”
  
• Don Goldwater 2006. We obtained Goldwater’s electronic filing of $5 donors from the Arizona Secretary of State’s office.
  
• Janet Napolitano 2006 and Len Munsil 2006. Napolitano and Munsil filed paper reports of their $5 donors. We obtained these records from the Arizona Secretary of State’s office. We then contracted with the Institute on Money in State Politics (www.followthemoney.org) to enter these records into a database.
  
  

Donors to Privately Funded Campaigns

• Matt Salmon 2002. We obtained these records from the Institute on Money in State Politics (www.followthemoney.org), which tracks state-level campaign contributions in all 50 states. We included contributions from individuals to his campaigns. In Arizona, privately funded candidates who raise more than $500 for their campaigns must itemize contributions of $25 and above.
  
• U.S. Senate 2006. We obtained individual contributions of $200+ to John Kyl and Jim Pederson for their 2006 Senate campaigns (six year totals) from the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org). The Center downloads these data from the FEC (www.fec.gov).

U.S. Census Bureau Data

The social, economic, and geographical information for zip codes used in this analysis was drawn from Summary File 3 (SF3) of the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and Housing. SF3 contains economic and housing characteristics compiled from a sample of approximately 19 million housing units nationwide (about 1 in 6 households) that received the Census 2000 long-form questionnaire.

Though most of the campaign finance data used in this report are from 2006, there is not an existing data source that directly provides information about zip codes in more recent years than the 2000 U.S. Census. An alternative to using 2000 Census data would have been to interpolate 2006 zip code characteristics using Census data from both 1990 and 2000. Since comparable zip codes were not identifiable in 1990, this would have required using county-level data and assuming that any changes observed in counties over the 10-year decennial period would be equally applicable to the zip codes within those counties. It would also assume that changes from 1990 to 2000 would have continued in a linear fashion until 2006. Rather than make these various assumptions, we chose to use the zip code characteristics taken directly from Census 2000.

Zip Code Tabulation Areas

ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) from the U.S. Census were used to link census information with campaign finance data. ZCTAs are a statistical entity developed by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating summary statistics from Census 2000. This new entity was developed to overcome the difficulties in precisely defining the land area covered by each zip code. With some exceptions, these units usually match the zip code for a given area. For more information on ZCTAs, visit www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html.

Linking 2000 Census data to campaign finance data from 2002 and 2006 using zip codes is complicated by the fact that zip codes can change over time. Thus, some zip codes reported in the campaign finance data did not exist as ZCTAs in the 2000 Census data. In these instances, Tiger/Line files from the U.S. Census and the U.S. Geological Survey were used to generate a crosswalk linking units across the various years. For more information about Tiger/Line files, visit www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/.

Linking campaign finance data to census data on race/ethnicity has other limitations. Neither the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) nor the Arizona Secretary of State’s office requires contributors to list their race/ethnicity or other demographic information along with their campaign contributions, so it is necessary to consult the census data. We use zip codes as the best, if imperfect, option. Because we are using zip codes, however, there is some inevitable distortion of the data. For example, there may be a zip code that contains both a large percentage of households with high and low income areas, or variation in racial/ethnic groups represented.

Privately funded candidates raised a significant proportion of their contributions from out of state. Because other states often have different demographic characteristics from Arizona, including these zip codes in our analysis might sometimes give over- or under-emphasis to a particular comparison. For example, out-of-state zip codes may have a higher proportion of African Americans because there is a larger African American population in those areas overall. For consistency’s sake, we included in our analyses all zip codes, whether from in-state or out-of-state, unless otherwise indicated.

When the Census Bureau delineates ZCTAs, they exclude certain zip codes such as those serving specific organizations or companies, and those that are dedicated only to Post Office (PO) Boxes. Thus, these are also omitted from our analysis.

In rare cases where there are negative campaign contribution amounts—which are attributable to refunded contributions—these contributions are added to totals.

Race and Ethnicity

In Census 2000, respondents were allowed to identify themselves as belonging to as many as four racial or ethnic groups, in addition to identifying themselves as Hispanic or non-Hispanic. In this report, persons are considered Hispanic if they identified themselves as such, regardless of what racial group(s) they may have reported. Whites, African Americans, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaska Natives are identified as non-Hispanics who reported belonging to a single race.

We use the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” to refer collectively to Central and South Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and others of Spanish and Latin American descent.

Blue Collar Occupations

Many categorizations exist that attempt to classify occupations as either blue collar or white-collar.

This report classifies the following Census occupation categories as blue collar: farming, fishing, and forestry, construction, extraction, and maintenance production, transportation, and material moving

Rural

Charts showing the percentage of a zip code that is rural are based on the U.S. Census definition of rural and urban. The U.S. Census defines a population as urban if it is located within a block or block group with a density of at least 1,000 persons per square mile, and surrounding blocks or block groups with a density of at least 500 persons per square mile. The remainder of the population is considered rural.

Poverty

Charts showing the percentage of persons in a zip code living below poverty are based on the U.S. Census definition of poverty. For more information, visit www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/povdef.html.