IRE-L Post From:barbanel@NYTIMES.COM
Date:05/18/95 07:21 PM GMT
Subject:Re: high tech political reporting (New York)

Last year, The New York Times did a number of projects on New York State races matching campaign contributors to special interest groups.

1) Lawyers and law firms and the race for Attorney General. At a time when the local Bar Association was calling for stringent limits on fund raising by candidates for attorney general, we looked at where the money was coming from in a four-way race for the Democratic primary for attorney general. We got some campaign contribution data on tape from a contractor, and because deadlines were too close we key punched hundreds of pages of campaign contribution data. We then matched this against an Office of Court Administration tape of every lawyer in New York State. We used a combination of computer matching and a lot of manual matching. We matched by name, we matched by address, we matched by law firm. The findings: We showed that a third of all contributions came from lawyers and lawfirms, many of which had at least potential conflicts of interest and we showed that one candidate, the interim incumbent and front runner, (G. Oliver Koppell - he lost the primrary and the primary winner Karen Burstein lost the election) had raised more than 40 percent from lawyers. We identified $900,000 in 1800 separate contributions. We also identified the law firms with the highest combined contributions from partners.

2) Giving at the Office: State Contractors. We looked at patterns of contributions by state contractors to the Republican and Democratic State Committees, and the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor. We used a database of contributors going back to 1982 that we assembled from a variety of sources, along with in house keypunched contributions on deadline. These were matched against a computer tape of state contractors. We used an elaborate "sloppy matching" technique in foxpro to matched both on first and last names (including misspelled names) , and a combination of lastnames and cleaned up addresses. These individual matches were then grouped into families.So that if we had a name of B. Smith at his office at 150 Broadway, that would also match B. Smith at his home at Scarsdale. and it would match Smith Engineering at 150 Broadway, and it would match John Jones at Smith Engineering at 150 Broadway, and then John Jones at his home in Larchmont and his wife Dolores Jones at the same address in Larchmont. This approach required a careful eyeballing to assure accuracy. The results: We identified $2 million in contributions of $500 or more from 322 contractors with $4.4 billion in state contracts. We found that the democratic incumbent, and especially the Democratic state committee (now penniless) as the major beneficiaries of this corporate largess, especially from engineering and road and building construction companies. In some contruciton type agencies,I think about 80 percent of the contractors were contributors. We found that major unions, all strong backers of the governor, had been the beneficiaries of state labor department training contracts.

3) Al Damato and George Pakati, the Hidden Ties We purchased Senator D'Amato's career federal contributions and matched them against contributors to Mario Cuomo, George Pataki and the state committee. Since D'Amato support was crucial to Pataki, we looked for indications that he was strong arming contributors. The results, however, showed the tension between the permanent government and partisan loyalty. There was a huge overlap betwen contributors to Cuomo and D'amato. Contributors who gave D'amato $1 million gave cuomo $1.6 million. Contributors who gave D'amato $1.3 million gave Pakaki $2.4 million and many of these were regular local republican contributors. Contributors who gave $600,000 to D'amato and were not otherwise regular state contributors gave only Pataki a total of $1.2 million. But another group of D'amato contributors who were not otherwise state contributors gave Cuomo $223,000. They gave Damato about the same amount.

4) The biggest contributors of them all. We used sloppy matching techniques to aggregate contributions by arguably related parties. husbands and wifes, unions and affiliates, individuals and their corporate contributions, to assemble lists of top givers,

>Any political reporters out there using the Internet and/or databases or
>spreadsheets to upgrade coverage of campaigns?
>Those who already have responded from my posting on CARR-L can disregard the rest.
>I'm interested in those who might have created a financial interests list of
>campaign contributors, those who have created their own state version of
>Project Vote Smart, those who routinely use the FEC online service or pick up
>contributions via lexis/nexis, and those who cover politics by covering
>political consultants and the expenditure side of an election.
>Please message direct.
>Thanks.
>Jay Perkins

Josh Barbanel barbanel@nytimes.com
Metropolitan Desk
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street, 3rd floor
New York, N.Y. 10036