Bush spending - blog invaluable.
Posted here Tuesday, February 24, 2004 at 8:51:52 AM 
Here is a good example of why the blogworld is becoming indispensible.
How They Spent $39 Million
Mickey Kaus has been wondering how the Bush campaign could have spent $39 million already. The data's out there, but it required you to download about 200 pages, one at a time, and scan through them. Rather than downloading and searching 200 pages manually, I wrote a quick Microsoft Excel macro that downloaded the pages and munged the information into a big (1 MB) Excel spreadsheet. (See? Microsoft Office macros aren't just for virus writers!)
Using Excel to sort the data, it's apparent where the money went. $8.4 million went to Olsen & Shuvalov for direct mail. $3.5 million went to Maverick Media, the ad agency. Presumably, that's for the ads that will start airing soon. About $4 million went to payroll. Another million went to Yuma Solutions and Insight for computer equipment/support. Those four big amounts account for about $17 million. As for the remaining $22 million, I don't think it's unreasonable to spend that amount of money to raise $150 million and keep the campaign running. Look at the spreadsheet and see what else you can figure out. To sort the data, click Data->Sort on the menu.
UPDATE: About $1.5 million is accounted for by refunded contributions. Another half million was given to charity (contrast with John Kerry's stinginess.) Travel costs were $1.5 million and catering and event expenses added up to at least $3.5 million. Another million dollars were spent on mailing and contributor lists. $1.5 million was spent on "transfer to compliance" (don't know what that means.) All that adds up to $9.5 million. Add that to the $17 million above and you get $26.5 million.
UPDATE 2: A reader added pivot tables to make it even easier to get information out of the spreadsheet. Here's his version (1.5 MB.)
posted by PoliPundit at 1:25 AM Link to this post |
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