Goods is becoming immensely popular, with almost 2 million users since the election! Now that lots of people are using the platform, we often get asked where our data comes from. To start, we hand curate all of it. This takes time but it ensures its accuracy. We don’t have bots out there scraping the web; we employ researchers to determine the parent company of specific brand(s) and then input the actual political donation data from prior federal elections.
Where Do We Get Our Data?
To do this, we aggregate the past 3 election cycles of FEC (Federal Election Commission) political contribution data. During that process, we differentiate between donations made by the corporate PAC and those made by senior executives. This ensures that our numbers reflect how the company itself is playing politics, not just sampling the political lean of its labor force. After all, it’s the senior executives who sign off on the way the PAC money is used.
Next, we show what percentage of the sum of PAC & Exec donations goes to each party. Using several cycles of data ensures that companies won’t be able to game our numbers by donating large chunks to either party at the end of a cycle, giving a better representation of their overall political footprint.
How To Read Our Data
Each brand’s page has 3 tabs containing 12 data points and user reviews. We’ve had plenty of questions about how to interpret these, so here’s a guide to each tab:
Info
This is the tab you’ll start on for every company. It contains info on the brand’s political support, amount of political funding, impact on campaign finance reform, substitute brands, and the way our users feel about the brand’s political behavior.
- Number of page views
- A small, gray number in the upper right of the page, near an eye logo.
- Blue Bar
- Percentage of total donations to Democrats
- Red Bar
- Percentage of total donations to Republicans
- Badge
- How the company’s donations lean
- The badges can represent a Democratic lean, Republican lean, 50/50 (gray), or green (for companies which don’t donate amounts significant enough to record)
- How many users support the brand’s political behavior
- How many users plan not to use the brand due to its political behavior
- Combined Contribution Level
- How much money the brand contributes to politics
- This can be Minimal, Low, Medium, High, and Very High
- The green thumbs up badge represents total contributions less than the Minimal amount
- Campaign Finance Reform
- How the brand’s contributions impact campaign finance reform, on a scale of -100 to 100
- Other brands
- Potential substitutes and the political lean of their donations
Reviews
This section lets you see other users’ reviews of the brand and post your own
Politicians
- Company
- The percentage of the brand’s donations that come from its PAC (political action committee)
- Senior Employees
- The percentage of the brand’s donations that come from its executives – VPs up to Board Members
- Top Recent Politicians Funded
- Up to 5 of the politicians the brand has given the most to in the last election cycle
- Given our methodology, it’s not uncommon to see mostly Republican politicians with a Democratic leaning company or mostly Democratic politicians with a Republican leaning company
How Often Do We Update?
We’re updating constantly. After all, we’re a data company, this is our core mission, and donations are happening even when campaigns aren’t right around the corner.
We plan to put a date on each brand’s page soon, to show how recent the numbers are and to avoid any confusion.
Why Do We Only Show Red & Blue?
Because, by and large, Republicans and Democrats are the ones receiving donations.
There are of course, other parties (Independent, Libertarian, and Green to name a few). However, one of two things tends to happen: Either the politician runs as a member of a minor party but reliably caucuses with one of the 2 major parties (Sen. Sanders (I-VT) & Sen. King (I-ME)) or they don’t raise enough money from major brands to appear in our research.
This appears to be the result of using a winner-take-all voting system. Voters support candidates and parties most representative of them. If those candidates and parties reliably fail to win in elections, voters either stop participating in elections entirely or vote strategically – support whichever party is closest to their own beliefs but also capable of winning an election. As a result, the two major parties shift their platforms over time to build the largest coalitions possible, which creates a political duopoly.
Corporate brands, wanting their money to be well-invested, mainly give it to the two political brands that reliably win elections, rather than riskier, upstart ones. So the vast majority of political donations go to Democrats, Republicans, or those who caucus with them often enough that the distinction is irrelevant. To be crystal clear, we’re not making a value judgement here, just giving our best guess as data analysts as to why most of the money donated to politics ends up in the 2 major parties.
If at any point, this changes, we’ll change how we display our data to reflect the new status quo. Our sole goal is accuracy and that will simply never change.
Why Don’t We Have Every Politician?
Not all politicians receive donations from brands. Many self-fund their campaigns or rely exclusively on small dollar donations. Our goal is not to discourage the financing of campaigns. They’re expensive and have to be funded somehow. What we focus on is corporate entities getting involved in politics, since brands have enough money to match the influence of 100, 1000, or 100,000 people, depending on their size. This naturally incentivizes politicians on both sides of the aisle to pay a little more attention to the donor, rather than the average voter, which makes our government less representative for all of us.
Why Are There Ads?
Our two goals are:
- Making this data available to the largest number of people
- Keeping the lights on
As with many app companies before us, we’ve found that the middle ground between offering a free tier for our product and ensuring we can pay for the work it takes to make it, is to serve ads. We know they can be annoying and work very hard to ensure they don’t detract from your experience. But the server costs, labor, and general workings of any organization require funding.
For anyone who can’t stand the ads, there is a reasonably-priced ad-free option. We also hope that once our user base gets large enough, we can find alternate and less intrusive ways to keep things running.