Every election campaign require a lot of money in order to reach out to maximum number of voters and increase the number of chances of winning but spending a lot on election campaigning does not guarantee the seat in the parliament. Our goal here is to analyze the expenses made by the candidates as well as the money raised by them during the campaigning period and to evaluate the final election result of 2016.
Different candidates from different political parties require loans to run the campaign and to reach out to as many voters as possible. The total loan of a political party is based on the loan taken by each candidate of the party as well as other loans which, helps to make the campaign successful.
From the graph, we can see that candidates from the Republican Party took the maximum amount of loan which is $106,078,598.64 for their 2016 campaign followed by the Democratic Party with a loan amount of $46,550,396.39 and Independent Party with a loan amount of $4,377,420.77.
Taking a loan does not guarantee a seat in the parliament but it is always worth a shot. The chart here shows the number of candidates from Democratic and Republican parties who took the loan and either won or lost the elections.
From the chart we can see that for the Republican Party only 28 candidates won the elections and 318 lost the election.
For the Democratic Party, only 15 candidates won the elections and 238 candidates lost the elections.
A stark difference can be observed between the two most popular presidential candidates. For instance, the party committee contribution for Hillary Clinton was $13,961.41 and her total contribution was $361,329,562.2 whereas for Donald Trump, the party committee contribution was $4832.88 and total contribution was $114,492,189.3.
The graph below shows the cash flow for top candidates of Republican and Democratic parties based on cash on hand at the beginning of the campaigning period and at the closing of the campaigning period.
The chart below Shows the maximum debt own by the committee for the top 20 winning candidates from Democratic as well as Republican Party. The Red bars represents the Republican Party and the blue bars represent the Democratic Party.
We can see that most of the winning candidates whose debt is own by the committee are from the Republican Party which even includes the current president of the United States Donald J. Trump having a debt of $2,086,572.41.
Data sources:
Data visualization platforms:
Flourish
Datawrapper
References: