Big business, lawyers, and the financial sector are the largest campaign backers of Hillary Clinton. Collectively they represent 35.5 million dollars donated to her campaign, 38% of total itemized funds donated to the Clinton campaign in 2015.
Bernie Sanders on the other hand is largely backed by a diverse collection of individuals: engineers, health care workers, artists, self-employed, academics, as well as to a much smaller extent business executives. Collectively these seven top donor industries only add up to 3.8 million dollars or about 20% of the itemized funds donated to the Sanders campaign in 2015.
It is worth noting that these numbers underestimate the total funds donated to each campaign due to reporting laws which require only funds adding up to $200 to be reported individually. The different effect of the reporting law is dramatic for the two candidates. For Hillary Clinton, because the vast majority of her funds come from large donors she has to itemize 84% of the funds she receives.
Bernie Sanders on the other hand is largely backed by small money and therefore must only report approximately 26% of the funds donated to his campaign. The result of this disparity of reporting is that superficially it appears that Hillary Clinton is raising vastly more money, but in reality her big donors are pretty much being matched by Sanders numerous small donors.
See: Analysis: Clinton backed by Big Money: Sanders by Small
However, this article is not discussing the size of contributions but the sectors contributing to each candidate.
| Figure 1: Proportion of itemized funds in each category. |
In Figure 1, we can see that the Sanders’ coalition is composed of a wide variety of working class individuals as well as intellectuals and artists. Hillary Clinton’s coalition is composed much more narrowly of large business, law, and …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com