High-Dollar Donors and Donor-Rich Neighborhoods: Representational Distortion in Financing a Municipal Election in Seattle

Candidates for municipal office collect millions of dollars to fund their campaigns. While previous research about local fundraising coalitions investigates the role of specific interest groups—for example, real estate professionals and developers—and donors outside the political jurisdiction, there has been little systematic investigation of individual donors classified by the size of their contribution or their geographic concentration within the city itself. In this article, we draw on administrative records of campaign contributions from the 2013 Seattle elections to answer two questions about the financing of municipal elections. First, drawing on research from federal elections, we ask whether candidates build fundraising coalitions comprised primarily of small-dollar donors or whether they rely heavily on high-dollar donors to fund their campaigns. In Seattle, we find that only one-fifth of donors in the mayoral election contributed at least $500, but their contributions account for 55% of the money raised in the election. Next, we ask how concentrated campaign contributors are within Seattle neighborhoods. Candidates collected nearly 25% of their funds from the wealthiest 10% of neighborhoods. By pointing to an outsized role for high-dollar donors and donors concentrated in affluent neighborhoods, this article identifies a critical dimension of representational distortion in municipal elections. In doing so, it opens a new window into the local campaign finance system—an aspect of our political process that has been largely overlooked in research on campaigns and elections.