When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl

As the election slouches to an end, I am coming to the end of these little data dives into the FEC individual contributions data. This month, we have a new wrinkle that I should have caught last time around, but there was a small problem with my data processing that left out a candidate.

On the 21st of every month, the FEC publishes a number of reports on the finances of various federal campaigns and I've been writing essays to present what I think are interesting features of the data. Last month, I noted that Clinton was raking in money hand over fist, but it wasn't giving her any traction with the electorate. That trend has continued, but the amounts are eye-opening:

Clinton raised more money from individual contributors in September than the Trump campaign raised over the entire election cycle. She is also outpacing Trump in terms of donors, but remember: This data set is skewed towards donors who contribute above the $250 threshold, and Trump supporters are generally less well-off.

Turning to the third-party/independent side of the election, we have a new entry:

While Johnson and Stein continue their linear growth of new supporters, we now have this guy Evan McMullin in the race. McMullin is a Mormon who is only running in Utah. Recent polling has him neck-and neck with Trump in that state and FiveThirtyEight was giving him a non-zero chance of being president. The way that would work is if he could win Utah, both duopoly candidates might be denied the 270 electoral votes needed to win and the House could choose him over the other two loathed candidates.

Taking a closer look at McMullin, I found a number of interesting things. To start with, although he has only been running since the beginning of August and is only on the ballot in Utah, he has donors from 44 states:

Clearly a number of people have decided to help him mess with the election, but who? Like all candidates, most of his supporters have not contributed to more than one candidate, but 95% those who have supported multiple candidates are pretty much either from the GOP field or former Clinton supporters:

In other words, the data shows that McMullin is the go-to guy for a bunch of conservative people around the country who want to vote against Trump. (By accident I also found that there is a famous Mormon Science Fiction writer among McMullin's donors, and this contributor gave to four other GOP candidates before finally latching on to McMullin like some sort of life raft.)

McMullin has raised over $200K from large donors in just two months, which is not shabby: The Stein/Baraka campaign took over a year to get to that point by the end of last June. I think this bodes well for an insurgent third party if they have a simple message and can get the word out.