Team Most Excellent
Team Most Excellent: Inside/Out Campaign Money in Gubernatorial Races
Team Members: Gershon Bialer, Jake Bialer, Vamshidar Reddy Boda,Beth Morrissey, Laura Rena Murray, Bill Tang, Dan Turner
Is the influx of millions of dollars to Wisconsin both for and against Scott Walker an aberration, or have state political races always been powered by "outside" influences? Our project collates and visualizes the amount and proportion of out-of-state money contributed to gubernatorial races in all 50 states and tracks from where this money came (which states, largest individual donors).
Our raw data was scraped from the Sunlight Foundation's [1] and other sources, and cleaned so that it could serve to power our interactive heat map (more to come on how that was made). Original investigative reporting on some of the top donors was added to illustrate how our tool can serve as a springboard for deep, data-driven journalism.
- Interactive map and news stories: http://datafest-excellence.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
- Network graph: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S506069GtLZ
- Visualization of out-of-state money as percentage of total, by state: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9cIo1MBiVaocXJZMk91Zmx1YjQ/edit
- Github: https://github.com/gersh/datafest-excellence
