A Unique Perspective

The Ron Paul 2008 Presidential Campaign Finances: A Unique Perspective
by Dan Bachelder
10/20/2007

In late Q3, and all but a very short time in early Q4 2007, the Ron Paul 2008 campaign placed a “widget" on their web site showing a running total of funds raised and a rotating list of recent of donor names. A few people, including myself, were able to start harvesting this data for the purposes of graphing and analysis. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time this level of transparency has ever been applied to the finances of a political campaign.

As the creator of RonPaulGraphs.com, I am probably in a very small group of people who spend more time than anyone, other than those in the direct employ of the Ron Paul campaign, looking at the fundraising data. As such, I've had a few requests to provide some more of my personal perspective and analysis. Even though I haven't written very much since I left college over 8 years ago, I figured I'd give it a shot.


The Data

I collect the finance data from the same source used by the “widget" on the RonPaul2008.com website. This data source is a Web Service, which is a URL one can access and receive a set of name/value pairs such as, total raised, time of last update, total number of donors and a short list of recent donors (including name, city and state). Every two minutes my software requests these name value pairs and writes them to a file.

The Process

Every 4 minutes my software reads the data file, generates a number of html pages and graphs as PNG images, pushes them to a web server, and the new files are immediately available on RonPaulGraphs.com.

The Graphs

I am currently generating about 50 graphs. Some of these 50 are simply different styles, flat bar graph vs. 3d bar graph, for instance. There are probably about 40 unique graph types, including “total raised: this week vs. last week", “total raised for Q4", “average donation size", and many more. Here are some of my personal favorites:

This graph is interesting because it not only shows the increase in weekly donations, but also how each day of the week compares to its predecessors.



As I write this on 10/20 we're seeing the strongest week yet with 2 of the best days of the quarter and the third consecutive “record breaking days" for Monday, Thursday and Saturday. I'll get into more about why that is soon.

This graph shows the total donated over the quarter with some markers on important events, these events play an important part in the shape of these graphs, which is also something I'll get to shortly.




This graph show the last 7 days, including today in yellow, and the previous 7 days before that in black. This is one of several graphs that allow one to see at a glance the current fundraising trends by showing both day over day and week over week comparisons.




Most of these graphs have donor counterparts where the values tracked are the number of donors as opposed to the total dollars raised. Unfortunately, on the morning of 10/20 that number was removed from the Web Service and those graphs have been rendered basically useless for the foreseeable future. I am leaving them on the site for historic purposes and because I hope they will resume publishing that critical number.

Events

Certain events have a very sharp impact on the level of donation, let's examine a few now.

Fundraising Emails. When Ron Paul sends an email requesting donations to his mailing list, the people listen. Note in the graph above showing total donations for the quarter. On the night of 10/17 a fundraising email was sent and the slope of the total donations line immediately became much steeper, indicating a large increase in donations. This increased donation level was evident from the minute that email was sent and for at least the next 36 hours.

Now look at this graph:




October 20th is special for a couple reasons. For several days preceding Saturday the 20th there was an ongoing of discussion on Ron Paul community web sites such as DailyPaul.com and RonPaulForums.com about trying to get as many people as possible to donate at roughly the same time (1pm-2pm EST) in order to send a message to the campaign and the media that grassroots organization is both powerful and organized. A web site was created (http://www.ronpaulmoneybomb.com/) and a plan came together quickly and spread through the community overnight. For reasons I will get to momentarily, I believe the campaign was basically unaware of this effort. Up until 1pm EST the donations for the 20th were moving along at a leisurely Saturday pace, even a little slower than normal. At 1pm on the dot the total number began increasing at an amazing rate, in terms of the graph, the line went straight up! The hour netted about $30k for the Paul campaign and the community organized effort got a big gold star with a little asterisk next to it. The asterisk is due to the fact that at roughly 1:38pm EST the Paul campaign sent an email asking for more donations for a completely unrelated effort (covering advertising costs in a new radio campaign) which was sure to cause a spike in donations on its own. How much did this email impact the “moneybomb" effort? I have no clue, but it's obvious the effort was going to be successful on it's own, given the steepness of the graph. If you look at the large version of the October 20th graph you will see a clear drop in the graph slope at 2pm when the “moneybomb" was complete. Although not as steep a drop off as could have been expected without the campaign email to add to the torrent of donors. My conclusion from this day is 3 fold, 1) grassroots organization works, and if the idea is good and popular it works at an amazing speed and seems to come together almost without effort. 2) The campaign is unaware of these efforts and has no control over them as clearly there would have been great value in allowing the grassroots effort to play out and rest briefly before sending an email which is known to bring out donors. 3) The Ron Paul supporters are far from tapped out. In fact, each campaign email, especially those written by Dr. Paul himself, seem to bring a larger and larger response, even those sent on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The Future

Stock analysis is often compared to a monkeys throwing darts.... Political analysis, especially this far from an election, is like giving the monkey a glass of scotch and a kick in the head. That said, I will now attempt to hit something of value with my concussed drunken monkey...

Ron Paul is going to raise a bunch of money. Not Obama or Clinton money but certainly “front runner" Republican money. His online total will easily reach $8 million and depending on exposure during the debates and up coming advertising campaigns they could blow by that number in December. How's that for wishy-washy?

The Ron Paul community will continue to be outstandingly spontaneous and generate donation and media spikes that will confuse and befuddle those who aren't neck deep in the community. There may even be some controversy about it. It's hard for many people to separate the organic efforts of the subculture(s) (if I may be so bold) that have sprung up around Ron Paul from the actual efforts of Ron Paul and his campaign staff. An example is the community driven ThisNovember5th.com web site. This is another “moneybomb" style effort (a la October 20th) that has the stated goal of “bring together 100,000 people to donate $100 each, creating a one day donation total of $10,000,000" . Ambitious? Probably. Out of reach? Maybe. Significant Impact? You better believe it. Have a look at this chart:




That is a chart showing the number of people who have subscribed at ThisNovember5th.com (indicating some level of commitment to this plan). As of 10/20 there are about 1,000 people a day signing up. Just for fun, let's say 300 people a day sign up for each of the remaining 16 days which would put the total at around 9,000. Now lets say each of those people only give an average of $50 (half of the stated goal) each, that's $450k in a single day. Almost as much as was raised in all of week 2 and more than was raised in week 1. This is a far cry from the intended goal (even though it could be, and very well might be, much, much higher) but it's still pretty darn impressive, ESPECIALLY because it's an event that was not planed with, cleared with, or discussed with the actual campaign. This is an entirely spontaneous and self organizing event. The most amazing part to me, is that it's not the first (October 20th) and it probably won't be the last (Veterans day?, Thanksgiving?, Christmas?, something else?).

This presidential campaign is in an amazing feedback loop of success, the message of the campaign is bringing in creative and enthusiastic people who do amazing things with the message, which in turn brings in more people with abundant energy and ideas. The yardstick for this success is the fundraising data which the Ron Paul campaign has left right out there on the table for us all to measure by.

More to Come?

There's a ton more to talk about... per capita donor distribution, trend projections, web traffic data, fundraising for efforts outside the campaign, meetup.com, intrade, and so much more. If this article is well received, I will continue to produce articles of this nature as the quarter rolls on.