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November 2, 2007 > News > Which politico gets the Rice dough?

Which politico gets the Rice dough?

By Evan Mintz | Thresher Editorial Staff

Analysis

Even though presidential elections are a year away, the nation is already wrapped up in the seemingly endless election cycles. And Rice is right on track, with students wearing Obama t-shirts and professors jumping right into the fundraising hootenanny. With still a year left until the 2008 elections, Rice has already given more money than was given in the entire 2002 election season.

If fundraising trends show anything, it is a distinct reaction to the election of President George W. Bush, and specifically, the War in Iraq. Donations during the 2000 election cycle, while obviously leaning Democratic, had distinct Republican showings. Since then, Democratic donations have dominated the Rice political scene. While the 2002 numbers may not seem that impressive, donors to Democrats completely shut out any other political orientation. Even more impressively, those donors for a mid-year election nearly outspent all Rice donors for the 2000 presidential election cycle.

However, contributions skyrocketed for the 2004 election cycle, the first major election since the beginning of the War in Iraq. While Republican donations were nearly $2,000 greater than those from the 2000 election, Democratic donations grew by nearly $44,000 over the 2000 election results. These Democratic numbers remained high though the 2006 election, which was a nation-wide boon for the Democratic Party as voters expressed their discontent with the Republican Congress and the War in Iraq. Indeed, in the 2006 election cycle, Rice donated more money to alternative parties than to the Republican party — however, this is due to a single $5,000 donation to the Green Party.

As the 2008 election continues, trends seem solid for the continued Democratic domination that Rice has seen since 2004. However, the election is still a year away, and if the past years have shown anything, Rice still has a lot of money to give out.

Explanation

For this article, we searched statistics for 2000-‘06 elections compiled on opensecrets.org, a Web site maintained by The Center for Responsive Politics, and FundRace for 2008 elections. We specifically searched for donations since the 2000 election cycle by people who listed Rice University as their place of employment — this

group included professors and staff alike. However, we chose to not list specific names of donors because we felt it would be an unnecessary violation of privacy and would not contribute to the overall article.

There are some flaws with our search method. First, it is possible that someone who works at Rice did not list Rice as his or her employer. However, the Thresher does not have a large enough staff to search

individually for every person listed in the Rice directory in a reasonable amount of time. For the time being, our current method provided the most accurate results possible.

Second, only contributions of $200 or more are included in the statistics. This is due to the fact that the only people who have to be reported are those who give donations of $200 or more to a federal candidate committee in an election cycle. Therefore, these statistics potentially overlook many small contributions.

Third, it is possible that faculty or staff made contributions to soft money or issue-based institutions that would not have to disclose campaign contributions. Our statistics do not take these into account.

Fourth, we did take some liberties and classify certain groups as Democratic or Republican even though they are not officially associated. In these circumstances, we made calls based on the groups’ policies. For example, we feel it is safe to count a donation to the National Abortion Rights Action League as a Democratic donation.

Finally, we compiled the 2008 statistics on Oct.. 22, so numbers may have been updated since then.

End of article

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