Campaign Spending Overview - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, NY-14, 2022
A high level view into operating expenditures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress
Running a successful campaign for US federal office requires support from a business. The candidate’s campaign committee is the business responsible for executing on the strategy and tactics to get elected. Today we’ll start looking at the elements of a successful campaign by an incumbent in the House of Representatives. Specifically, we will look at the Representative from the 14th district of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
The criteria we use to determine a whether or not a campaign was successful is very simple: “Did the candidate win?” We know the 2022 AOC campaign was successful because the incumbent representative (AOC) still holds that office after running in the 2022 election cycle and winning the election.
The graph above shows the monthly expenditures made by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress committee. This committee is registered with the Federal Election Committee (FEC) and follows the reporting requirements set out by the FEC’s rules regarding candidate committees. The data used in this post is sourced from the FEC and analyzed by me using custom data tools I wrote to make strategic campaign decisions.
A few things jump off the graph. The administrative, salary, and overhead expenses line is consistently the highest expense category over the entire two-year election cycle. There is a wide range in this category, with the lower monthly expenditures during the off-year August-February months. The spend is under $300k per month during this time, with the low of $240k in February 2022, and the local high at $285k in September 2021. This implies a lower bound to the expenditures for Administrative/Salary/Overhead expenses is about $250k/month to keep personnel on the campaign.
Next item off the graph is the Solicitation and Fundraising Expenses line. Expenditures in this category are front-loaded in the election cycle. The committee spent $1.276M on fundraising expenses in the first four months of the election cycle. This expense category sharply decreases after April 2021 and flattens by the end of the year. The election year itself sees solicitation and fundraising expenses trend lower. The committee may have raised “enough” money through its solicitation efforts to sustain itself through the election. Next time we will look at the impact of this expense on fundraising efforts. This is a good point to return to. A successful campaign should be able to understand its return on investment in this category. A successful campaign should also be able to understand if its fundraising efforts are actually successful in a statistically meaningful way.
Administrative, Salary, and Overhead expenses tick up during the spring and summer months in the election year. The chart I made doesn’t go into the level of detail I'd like here. The committee uses credit cards and pays the monthly balance as it comes due. Next time I’ll look into the data regarding what goes onto the credit card.
Finally we come to the Advertising Expenses. This is an interesting one because there is a limited amount of time the ad spend is significant, if it is not hidden on the monthly credit card bill. It’s striking that the advertising expenses are really only significant in October of the election year. The committee spent over $400k on advertising in October 2022, the month before the election. What factors led to the decision to spend that amount of money just before the election? Why not spread it over a longer period of time? Do other campaigns follow this pattern?
More questions arise every time out. Now that I have a great tool for exploring this data, I am better able to spend my time analyzing the strategy behind winning campaigns through insights into campaign finance. I’m going to make this tool available eventually.
There are a lot of different directions to go now that there is a wealth of data available to make decisions and find successful campaign markers. Next time I’d like to focus on where the AOC campaign compares with some historical markers and some current benchmarks. I’d like to look at the historical NY-14 district candidates versus the AOC campaign committee, and then look at the AOC campaign committee as compared with the rest of the US House of Representatives. I’ll also look at where the AOC committee compares with US Senate campaigns.
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