If you're a liberal on the Internet, you've probably seen something like this pop up on your feed in the past couple of days:
The narrative implication of this is simple: Cory Booker and the other Democrats who voted against the amendment on the budgetary agreement introduced by Klobuchar and Sanders did so because they are in the pocket of Big Pharma.
Statistically, however, these numbers are meaningless. They don't even provide evidence for correlation, let alone causation, because the subset of information is so targeted that it cannot imply a trend.
So I decided to contextualize the data to see whether a more accurate picture still reflected that narrative.
The first thing I will say is that, in this instance, making a rudimentary case for a narrative around a single data point required the compilation of 600 data points in six different sets.
These sets were as follows:
Senator's name
Party
Total money raised overall
Total money raised from within the Pharmaceutical Industry
Total of those donations coming from individual donors
Total of those donations coming from PACs
I compiled all of my data from OpenSecrets.org, a nonprofit site dedicated to compiling data on campaign finance. If I had the time and money of Nate Silver, I would have created a metadata analysis to take into account the accuracy of the data, as well as to provide a more thorough compilation. Some of the current Senators don't have applicable data sets because the information has not been updated yet to reflect their status as new members. The data also does not reflect Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, or his Democratic party status.
So let's start with breaking down the Democrat "nay" votes.
First off, the Occupy meme uses the gross amount, in dollars, raised by each senator from the pharmaceutical industry from 2011-2016. While this certainly highlights the amount of money that gets spent on political campaigns, especially when the only comparison we are offered is that of our own personal finances, it does virtually nothing to suggest influence. So I calculated the percentage of total funds raised by a candidate that come from within the pharmaceutical industry. The same list of names now looks a bit different.
Booker’s place in the grouping falls substantially, as you can see.
But of course, one of the major problems with the Occupy meme is its targeted data set, so lets expand that for some context. This is the same measurement (% of overall funding that comes from the pharmaceutical industry), but for all of the Democratic senators:
Now, certainly five of the eleven senators in question are clustered where you would expect them to be, but Booker is behind all of them, and even behind Klobuchar, the cosponsor of the amendment in question. And Cantwell’s opposition vote makes next to no sense if money is the only factor.
But let’s check these against the same figures for the Republican senators, just to see what happens:
The average is higher, but not by much, though the highest percentage from any Democrat is well below the highest two percentages for any Republican. More interesting is that every single one of the votes that broke with party line falls below the party average. That’s not the case for the Democrats.
But breaking these numbers down further, it’s important to take note of how much of what is being considered as “Pharma” money is coming from individual donors who happen to work in the industry, versus PACs that generally represent the interests of investors and CEOs.
Here we see all but two of the “nays” riding above the average. Booker, again, has fallen lower on that list, and is in fact one of the two below the average. Cantwell is just a mystery. Now, compare that with the Republican percentages:
The average is much higher, including two senators who got all of their pharmaceutical donations from PACs—but again, one number doesn’t tell you much of anything, because those two senators got well below the overall percentage of their funds from the industry, and Murkowski voted for the amendment. But the senators who broke party line are pretty evenly spread across the map here, which is not the case for the Democrats.
But let’s finish by putting these two calculations together:
Now, there is a case for correlation here. Six out of the eleven votes are clustered above average for both percentiles. Four of the remaining five are clustered above one of the percentiles, Booker among them. Booker, it should be noted, also falls closest to Klobuchar in the graph, yet Klobuchar, again, cosponsored the amendment. And someone needs to ask Cantwell what she was thinking, because if she’s supposed to be beholden to her money, she’s doing it wrong. But then again, so are Whitehouse, Wyden, Manchin, Blumenthal, and Schumer, who all fall in the top right quadrant, where you would expect all of the "nays" to be, yet they voted "yea." They should take a lesson from the Republicans:
Every single "yea" falls below the average % of funds from the industry.
It’s interesting that in terms of money influencing votes, the weight of each data set is different between the parties. The Democrats’ “nay” votes cluster above average on the scale of how much of their pharmaceutical money comes from PACs, while the Republicans’ “yea” votes cluster below average on the scale of how much of their overall funds come from the industry at large. Which would suggest that in looking for the ways money influences politics, PACs mean more to Democrats, and overall money means more to Republicans…
BUT…
THIS IS JUST ONE VOTE…
THIS IS JUST ONE POSSIBLE REASON FOR ONE VOTE…
This is one very rudimentary glimpse at the data immediately surrounding one particular narrative about one single vote. You would have to look at every vote related to pharmaceuticals, break down all of the data into these sets again, compile all of them, and see if the pattern remains in order to BEGIN making the case for causation. Then you would have to take that data and compare it to data from other industries—control groups—to see if the pattern is unique to the pharmaceutical industry. Until then, searching for a particular pattern to support a particular narrative will only serve confirmation bias.
I don’t have the time or money or access to do that analysis properly. If you want to do it yourself, or bug Nate Silver, go ahead. But as grateful as I am that Sanders has pushed the issue of campaign finance to the fore of Democratic voters’ minds, he has also pushed a very simplistic, zero-tolerance narrative: all money from within an industry is the same, and any money a candidate receives from that industry is the reason for their vote. There are simply too many outliers to say that conclusively.
Let me try to put this another way. If we were to go back in time, before the vote was cast, and predict the outcome based on these assumptions:
money from Pharma will influence the vote
the better indicator for how Democrats are influenced by money is % from PACs
the better indicator for how Republicans are influenced by money is overall % of funds from the
industry
Your chances of being right would be 37.5% for Democrats and 100% for Republicans.
And you wouldn’t have guessed Cory Booker.
I don't do this type of work normally. I'm an artist. My politics are usually emotionally-driven. Although I have always been good at math, and I find math comforting and beautiful. And part of me has wondered for the past couple of days why I did this. Why I felt compelled to research the numbers and follow them in this way. I mean, I like Cory Booker--his ideas on education notwithstanding--but I don't particularly have a deep need to defend him. So why do this? Especially if, going into it, I know that I'm not going to pull enough data to make a conclusive case?
Perhaps because I wanted to show just how much data you could compile and still be unable to make a conclusive argument.
There is a stereotype about Democrats: that we are excellent at eating our own. I think it is part and parcel of the liberal ideals, and as such, not easily avoided. But with a fight like we have never known looming before us, it is time to close ranks. We need our ideals to hold us together, not tear us apart. Which certainly does not mean we shouldn't voice our dissent, but the tactics here weren't corrective, they were punitive. And they were reckless with the numbers, reckless with the pain and the fear that this election has caused, and reckless with our anger at the state of our campaign finance system. We are not just fighting against an oppositional party, we are fighting against the slip into a post-truth, post-fact, post-critical-thinking world. We must insist on the truth, at all costs, even at the cost of a comfortable, simplistic narrative that makes it easy to spot the bad guys.
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