I mentioned last week about Vilsack creating the Heartland PAC and it’s prototype website. Now a reporter at the Mason City Globe Gazette is writing about the Heartland PAC’s fund raising activities so far (thanks to State 29 for the original link). But the reporter isn’t helping readers to make decisions for themselves, they are parroting the same old (but true) line about Democrats and labor being too close to each other.
First off, they should provide a link to the IRS 8872 filing for the Heartland PAC (or at least a link to where you can search for it on the IRS web site). Next, they should just print all the contributers and let you do your own analysis. This is not a long list, there were only 16 contributions (two from the same PAC) during this period. Remember, bandwidth is cheap.
Here is my 5-minute analysis of the $635,000 in contributions so far:
- 7 Unions – $315,000 – 50%
- 6 Corporations – $220,000 – 35%
- 1 Individual – $50,000 – 8%
- 1 PAC – $50,000 – 8%
Oh, go ahead and play with the spreadsheet I created yourself.
Why can’t reporters do this stuff for us? This took me about 10 minutes to do from finding the IRS form to creating the spreadsheet. Why do they always have to pick and choose the stuff they think is interesting? (Even when it’s not interesting, “Shocking news, local Democrat gets lots of money from labor unions”, this is not news.)
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Mikey, (Sort of difficult calling an adult Mikey, but okay) great work! I went fishing in the FEC files for this stuff, obviously wrong place. I haven’t worked your spreadsheet yet, but will get to it and probably link to this post.
My thought on the money, if it is all from Iowa, and it probably is, it will be crushing in terms of eating up cash for other Democrats in lower level races. In politics, as in any world, you have a maximum amount of money you can suck out of cohort before it gets tight. If donors are playing the odds that Vilsack is going some where or, more likely, they need one more good session before he is out, well the money flows to where the deals get made.
BTW – thanks for your posts. I’m a little behind on the blog “product†as it as sort of taken on a life and, like everyone else doing this thing, I have at least five other lives that need to come first.
Thanks for the comment.
Since the Heartland PAC is a 527 it’s hard to find stuff about them from the FEC. I guess this means 527s have nothing to do with “elections”.
I hadn’t even thought to look at the geography of where the money was coming from. Good idea. But then that’s why I want the press to help put more source materials like these in the public’s hands – so we can play with it and make up our own minds.
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