Contributions and Contributors in the 2004 Presidential Election Cycle

2004 marked a very close presidential race accompanied by unprecedented mobilization and high rates of interest, attention, and participation by the electorate (Bergan et al. 2006). The 2004 election marked a record turnout of over 60 percent of eligible voters, or 122.3 million voters, representing a dramatic increase from the 2000 election which attracted 105.4 million voters (or 54.2 percent of the voting-eligible population) to the polls. Voter turnout in 2004 was the highest of any election since 1968. Interest in the election and attention to the campaign also spiked in 2004. In 2004, 85% of respondents to the National Election Studies (NES) poll claimed to care a lot about the campaign compared with 78% in 2000. Similarly, in 2004, 52% of respondents claimed to be "very much" interested in the campaign, up from 29% in 2000. There was a corresponding increase in the level of attention to the presidential election; 65% of respondents claimed to pay "a great deal" or "quite a bit of attention" to the election in 2004 versus 47% in 2000 (NES 2004, 2000). The 2004 elections were also accompanied by increased contributing behavior; presidential candidates more than doubled total campaign funding receipts from the 2000 electoral cycle. In this article, we will explore the population of donors and attempt to explain the reason for the increase in contributors. The results suggest that campaign contributing, like voting behavior, was affected by the competitiveness of the presidential race: two ideologically opposed candidates were facing one another in what many perceived as a close election. The level of interest in and the overall competitiveness of the race worked in conjunction with new institutional features, such as technological innovations and campaign finance regulations, to increase the number of contributions during the 2004 campaign. Many different forms of participation are marked by unrepresentativeness of participants versus the population as a whole in either political attitudes or demographic characteristics (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). A typical complaint about campaign contributions is that they skew the political contest away from the typical voter by favoring wealthy contributors. While this may have been the case in the 2000 election, in the 2004 election there appears to be a rough balance in ideological contributors. While contributors are not ideologically similar to the average individual, there is a rough balance of the number of contributors on the left and right. The results suggest that with more widespread contributing during a campaign, contributors appear to be more evenly balanced ideologically; this claim has been made concerning other types of behavior (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993) and appears to hold for campaign contributing. We will draw on two datasets to explore the 2004 contributors. The first data set involves aggregate contribution data. Because the contributions are categorized by size and by type of contribution (individual contributions versus PAC contributions or public funds), we can make some claims about the nature of contributions in the 2004 presidential election cycle. The large percentage of small contributions during the 2004 election suggests that it is greater participation by individuals interested in the campaign driving the increase in contributions, rather than say groups interested in some form of quid pro quo. The second data set we use to explore donors, the NES survey, includes questions about a number of demographic and ideological attributes of donors versus noncontributors which allow us to determine how representative donors are of the population as a whole. In addition, the data allow us to attempt to explain why some individuals give and others do not. The next section will use aggregate data to explore donors. The following two sections will use NES data; the first of these will explore the importance of the effect of institutional features such as the Internet and new reforms on contributing behavior. …