How Much Out of State Money is Flowing into Midterm Battleground States?

How much outside money is flowing into contested senate races during the midterm elections? We find out.

Methodology

The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) tracks and reports on donations to campaigns. We scoured through the data to understand which party benefited the most from outside money in the 2022 midterm Senate races in Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  

We classified these donations as individual or a committee (any donation that did not come from an individual was classified as an committee due to the multiple types of committee classifications). We then divided these donations by party, state and if the source was from out of state or not.

Results

Overall the GOP has fundraised the largest amount of out of state money in these states.  We found most of this money to be coming from political committees.

Of all the states we found the Nevada had the most out of state funding followed by Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

After breaking it out by type we can see that the majority of the out of state funding is going into Nevada in the form of Committee donations. Georgia has the next most out of state donations, in both the form of Committee and Individual donations (roughly equal).

Breaking these out by party we can see that the Nevada GOP candidate (Laxalt) has the most out of state donations followed by the Georgia DNC candidate (Warnock).  

Breaking these out into individual or committee donations we find that Georgia DNC candidate (Warnock) had the most out of state individual fundraising followed by the Nevada DNC candidate (Masto).

The Nevada GOP candidate (Laxalt) had the largest amount of out of state Committee fundraising followed by the Georgia DNC candidate (Warnock).

Looking at the average individual donation we found that GOP candidates tended to raise larger amounts of money from individuals, except in Wisconsin where the DNC candidate (Barnes) outraised the GOP candidate (Johnson).

Finally, we looked at the employers of the individual donors to see which companies out of state employees were contributing to which candidates.  

The Georgia DNC benefited by far over any other political candidate in Senate races in these states. In fact, GOP candidates were not a beneficiary in the top 10 individual contributors’ employers.

The DNC benefited the most from the following companies the most in Georgia and Nevada:

GOP candidates benefited the most in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin:

Results

We found that the Nevada race has the largest amount of outside money coming primary into the GOP candidate’s campaign (Laxalt) followed by Georgia’s DNC candidate (Warnock).

Committee money is often money coming from either PAC’s or congressional committees as a way for the party to aid it’s candidates in certain states. The GOP had the most outside support in this form, particularly in Nevada.

Individual money is money that represents out of state individual interests (and often their employers). The DNC, particularly in Georgia had the most support from these forms of donations, particularly from employees of Google, Wilmerhale (a firm dedicated to Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in the Legal Profession) and Microsoft.