Wondering where your corporation stands on climate change?

The below is a visualization of campaign contributions from PACs [Political Action Committees] and which candidates they are supporting.

PACs are created by various organizations to collect money to support candidate(s) they want in office. So, for example, JP Morgan (the giant American bank) has one called JPMorgan Chase & Co. Federal Political Action Committee.

Such a committee would collect money from their employees (who are typically senior managers, say VP or higher) and then the Senior-most Managers of that organization (and who run the PAC) then distribute money to those candidates they deem worthy of investment and who they feel will help their cause.

Click here for more info on PACs

I thought it would be interesting to see which candidates our corporations are supporting in terms of climate change. So I mashed-up FEC data with League of Conservation (LCV) data. LCV maintains a scorecard of Members of Congress based on how their voting record for green legislation. The higher the rating, the more favorable a candidate is towards green endeavours.

After selecting a PAC from the drop-down, you'll see on the left side of the diagram how much the PAC is spending on each party (each candidate is affiliated with a party). On the right hand side, you'll see the average of the LCV scores for the party (averaged across all the candidates the PAC supported).

For e.g., JP Morgan Chase below is spending more money on Republican candidates but the average LCV rating for these same candidates is pretty pathetic (but this is true for Republicans on the whole). On the bottom-most table you'll see a drill-down of the actual candidates the PAC gave money to.

The above visualization is derived from two sources:

The data used was the most recent data entering the 2018 midterm elections and the 2017 LCV data.

The code to extract the data from the LCV site was written in R and is here: Link to Github

There was some manual work needed on the data due to several factors:

  1. Candidates on the LCV list had resigned or were not running again
  2. Candidates were leaving their posts to run for other positions so they had no PAC for their current position
  3. Congressional Districts were redrawn for the election in 2018, so the LCV list needed to be updated (Much of this was in PA)

To Do

  1. Remove Members who Lost in 2018
  2. Add Members who won in 2018 (However, they won't have any LCV ratings as they will be fresh to Congress)

The gist is that the Republicans don't have a very good record at supporting green initiatives. If climate change is a concern to you, then you need to vote Democrat.