Are Donations Representative of the Average American?

       

          As I mentioned in my previous blog post, when the media associates a politician with a lot of money, the public tends to view the politician in a negative light. A lot of times, news reports will cover how much money a politician is spending on a campaign, which allows for the agenda setting theory to kick in. We discussed this theory in class and our textbook defines it as, “the media not telling people what to think, but telling them what to think about”. Especially during election years, the media puts the public’s focus on campaign spending and big donors.

            According to an essay by Brittany Bramlett et. al., “a small and extremely wealthy set of people fund American political campaigns”. This is problematic to the American public opinion because, “donors are highly unrepresentative of the public” and “the prevailing view-point in high-donor neighborhoods can be characterized as cosmopolitan and libertarian, rather than populist or moralistic”. A press release said Obama is focusing on raising money from his small donors. According to the press release, “Obama’s small donor fundraising in 2011 outpaces all of his Republican opponents combined”. While these donors may not be representative of the majority of the voters, since they are able to give again and again candidates tend to focus on them. 

            In the Youtube video below, it highlights different clips from various news channels discussing Mitt Romney’s need for more small donor support. Small donors are necessary to keep a campaign running and with all of the different medium to advertise a political campaign, it is costing more money to do so.

            Below is a graph showing how much Mitt Romney has increased his small donors fundraising throughout his campaign. Clearly, they have become an increasingly large part of the presidential campaign.

Sources:

Bramlett, B., Gimpel, J., & Lee, F. (2011). The Political Ecology of Opinion in Big-Donor Neighborhoods. Political Behavior, 33(4), 565-600. 

Campaign Finance Institute. "Small Donors in 2011: Obama's Were Big, Romney's Were Not.

Youtube video: Having a Small Donor Problem Mitt Romney?

HuffPost Politics - Small Donors to Mitt Romney's Campaign. Graph.

The Media of Mass Communication. John Vivian.