Where Are Presidential Donations Coming From In California?

Last week, all presidential candidates had to file reports on their fundraising for the last quarter. KPIX Political Analyst Melissa Caen has been sifting through the data and is here to tell us what it means.

We all know that major candidates have raised millions of dollars through political action committees and other places. But what is so important about the campaign filings that just happened is that they show us who is getting regular American citizens to open our checkbooks. Anyone can say they support a candidate, but to give money shows people are pretty fired up.

I crunched the data on the most recent filings to see who was raising the most money and who was motivating the most people here in California.

Here are the Democratic candidate results:

And the Republican candidate results:

These are individual contributions between July and September of this year. As you can see, Hillary Clinton is raising the most money by far.

Remember that these contributions are all before the Democratic debate. Clinton and Sanders claim to have gotten a big boost after that but that's not in these numbers.

Look at the contrast between Bush and Sanders. Where Bush has fewer contributors, he's bringing in more money because each person is giving more. Sanders has the most contributors of anyone but is in third place because the amounts are smaller. Of the Republicans, Carson had the highest number of people giving.

Marco Rubio was edged out by Ted Cruz who had far more contributors. Donald Trump continues to deny that he needs campaign contributions, so it's not surprising that so few people decided to give him money.

Martin O'Malley should be concerned about such a poor showing. He, Webb and Chafee are getting trounced by Lawrence Lessig -- a Harvard Professor and Democratic activist committed to getting money out of politics. If the guy committed to getting money out of politics is raising more money than you, it's a problem. All three of those candidates should be very concerned.

There is a lot of similarity between Hillary's supporters and Sanders, of course in L.A. and the Bay Area. But if you look closely you can see that Hillary is getting more contributions from Silicon Valley and Sanders is actually doing well outside of the urban centers. There's a perception that Sanders' supporters are all white, liberal city dwellers.

There are some names that you might find interesting in the candidate files. Hillary Clinton's California supporters include Matt Damon ($2700), Octavia Spencer ($5400), Geena Davis ($5400), Michael Douglas ($5400) Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks ($2700 each) and Corey Feldman ($201). Bernie Sanders' supporters include Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman ($2700 each), Tim Roth ($500), Maura Tierney ($2700) and Jackson Browne
($1350).

And finally, Jim Webb has not raised a lot of money but he does have a celebrity supporter, actress Madeleine Stowe who gave 2700 to his campaign.

You just never know what you're going to find in these filings.