Thursday

Oct252012

Who Bought Your Politician? Check With Our Widget

Find out who's buying your politician.
Click the gray 'Select A Candidate' box at the top of the widget.
---
Wired created the widget in conjunction with Maplight, the Berkeley, California-based nonprofit dedicated to following money and politics.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/wired-campaign-widget/
Widget lists the top 10 donors and their contributions to any member of the House and Senate, their opponents, and the presidential candidates.  Maplight pulls down up-to-date campaign-financing figures from the Federal Election Commission, which are fed into a database so the widget stays current.
The widget shows where candidates are ranked in terms of how much money they’ve raked in compared to their peers. It also shows how they rank among all federal candidates. Obama, for example, comes in first for presidential candidates, having garnered $201 million.  Mitt Romney, comes in with $150 million.
Goldman Sachs has given Romney nearly $544,000 - his top contributor.  The largest contributors to the president were government employees, at more than $2 million.
When we unveiled the original widget, we used it to produce a story about federal funding and a controversial helicopter — Follow the Money: Pork-Powered Pig Preps for Flight, which highlighted pay-to-play contributions to select politicians from defense firms hoping to win a contract to build the next Marine One, the president’s personal helicopter.