I wasn't planning to write this for a few more days, but the data became available this morning and it was so interesting I had to share.

A little background. The FEC puts out a data set of prior month campaign contributions on the 20th of the following month. It only contains donors who either gave more than $250 or choose to self-report, so it is not a good statistical sample for the voting public, but it can often give us a good overview of how the money is flowing among those of moderate means.

One problem with using the data is that Trump was not getting any donations during the primary. The only R with anything like a normal donor base was Cruz, but he eventually lost, so the data was mostly only interesting for looking at the Democratic race.

No longer. As of the convention, Trump now has as many donors from this pool as Clinton:

Even more interestingly, his average donation from this donor pool is only half ($152) of the average donation to the other populist candidates (Stein and Sanders).

But all is not well in duopoly land - the two third party candidates also show a massive spike in donors:

In fact, the third party spikes are in the last weeks of July, corresponding to the conventions. This is the fear and loathing aspect: some people were apparently ready to jump ship the moment it was a done deal.

But these "spikes" are pretty tiny compared to the duopoly numbers. Jill Stein has about 1500 donors now, which is more than twice what she started the month with, but about a tenth of a percent of the two main party candidates.

On the other hand, the glass half full argument points out that by polling at 5-10%, the third parties get highly disproportionate results for their money. If they can continue to raise money and get exposure going forward, I expect they can gain a lot of ground before they run into diminishing returns.

Next month will be interesting. I expect a lot of people were tapped out at the beginning of July with final scheduled donations (e.g. I opted to send my monthly budget to Bernie to fund delegates instead of moving on) but August will be the first time we get to see post-convention realignments. I honestly don't expect to see a lot because other analyses I have done show extremely high rates (> 99.5%) of loyalty in this donor pool. It seems that if your first choice doesn't make it, very few people are willing to make a second bet, but Bernie and Trump continue to cast long shadows over this election and I hope to be surprised.

Donor loyalty analysis takes more work, so it will be a little while before I have the data crunched for July. If there is any radical change (aside from the obvious Trump stampede) I'll do a follow up post.