On the Records: Hutchison vs. White Money

If Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Houston Mayor Bill White share any political supporters, few of them are opening their wallets.

A quick analysis of campaign-finance reports shows that only a fraction of their donors crossed over to help the candidates' respective bids for Texas governor and U.S. Senate.

You might suspect, of course, that Republican and Democratic candidates in partisan races would collect cash from different donors. Some suspected otherwise, and suggested that I check.

To do this analysis, I used a database manager to match* Hutchison's governor's race donors (from January 1 to June 30) with White's senate race donors (from January 1 to Sept. 30). Below are the results.

Hutchison donors of more than $1,000 who also gave to White ($190,000):

White donors of more than $1,000 who also gave to Hutchison ($538,000):

*Joining databases by names is tricky, especially when the records don't have complete addresses, so this analysis isn't perfect. We probably have missed some shared donors (Jim Smith and James Smith don't match) or even confused some donors with common names. Joining on first name, last name and city -- while also excluding people who donated less than $1,000 -- should have kept the results pretty clean, however.