UPDATE (9:29): I wrote the below post last night and set it to publish this morning. Caraway’s paperwork has since been posted to the county’s site. I’ll get to work on his donors and have another post up as soon as possible. One tasty tidbit, though: Wick gave Caraway $2,500.
ORIGINAL POST: John Wiley Price is a piece of work. That much is clear. When it became known earlier this week that Dwaine Caraway had missed two campaign finance filings, Price smartly jumped at the opportunity, saying Wednesday, “Most of the people that are supporting him don’t want their names divulged, come on … because it’s white North Dallas!” It’s hard to side with Caraway. He clearly lied about why he hadn’t filed his reports. First it was because he was new to the whole process and because he and his staffers had been sick. Then he said he didn’t file because he was trying to protect his donors from Price’s harassment. His has turned into a laughably inept campaign.
But let’s take a look at where Price’s recent donors live, shall we? (I’d like to do the same with Caraway’s donors, but that’s impossible, for now.) I pulled Price’s two most recent filings, from January 1 and February 1. Then I looked at his biggest donors. Here’s what I found:
The first filing lists 91 contributions for a total of $44,930. The second lists 24 contributions for a total of $15,260. I looked at only contributions of $1,000 and above that came from North Texas. Result: just 18 of the 115 contributions from the two reporting periods accounted for $28,500, or 47 percent of his total take. Those are the 18 contributions I’ve mapped. You can click around on the map here and see who gave what.
Bottom line is that Price has support from white North Dallas. In particular, Don Williams, the former Trammell Crow exec, is a huge fan of John Wiley Price. In the two filings I looked at, Williams and his wife gave $6,000 to Price in four contributions. And of the $28,500 I’m talking about — nearly half of the big-money donations from the last two reporting periods — more than 80 percent of it came from sources that look to me like “white North Dallas” (broadly defined, for the purposes of this post, as not “the community”).
I’m painting here with a broad brush. And, like I said, I can’t perform this same exercise on Caraway’s filings because he hasn’t, um, filed them (or has filed them late, either because someone had the flu or, worse, because Caraway intentionally broke the law to conceal from the public (including Price) who supports him). I promise to look at Caraway’s big-money contributions as soon as his documents are online. In the meantime, it’s fun to imagine Don Williams’ mental calculus before he started giving cash. “Let’s see. I know he’s under federal indictment. But I’m pot committed. Seems $6,000 is a small bet with a potentially huge payoff.” Something like that?
