Here’s a Friday afternoon time suck: the New York Times has a detailed map of the donors who are contributing to the 2020 Democratic campaigns. Basically, you can click on the map, run your cursor over the zip codes, and find out which candidate has the most individual donors in that area. You can read the New York Times piece for an analysis for how the national fundraising scene is shaking out (spoiler: Bernie’s killing it and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Pete Buttigieg are fighting for silver and bronze). What I wanted to know is who Dallas voters are spending their money on.
The big takeaway from Texas is that Beto still dominates throughout the state, and Julian Castro is having trouble funding donors outside of his San Antonio base. Beto’s appeal, however, appears very limited to Texas, which made me want to dig into the map and see which candidate local voters might support if Beto doesn’t make it to the final rounds.
Using a very scientific approach of dragging my cursor across the Dallas zip codes, I found that O’Rourke ranks first in virtually all the districts, while Bernie and Buttigieg claim second and third respectively with a few notable exceptions. Biden is resonating in parts of North Dallas, and Warren is doing well in Uptown and southeast Dallas. Julian Castro isn’t resonating anywhere at all, except for one chunk of southeast Fort Worth.
Then I checked out the suburbs and found something interesting. Throughout the ‘burbs—Collin County, the mid-cities, some of the southern suburbs–Warren knocks Buttigieg out of the third spot in the fundraising rankings. I think that’s interesting. If we take these early fundraising numbers as an indication of voter appeal, then Warren’s ability to move the needle in the Dallas suburbs may be indicative of something brewing.
As cities and rural areas become predicable bases for blue and red voters, the purple ‘burbs have been pivotal in swinging recent elections. It’s early, and we’re only looking at a sliver of data, but if we were to use the Dallas’ burbs as a crystal ball to predict the White House, then Bernie and Warren’s resonance north of 635 may be something to watch.
