A sliver of the country funds the rest
What share of American adults supply half of all individual campaign donations?
Cumulative share of individual donor dollars against cumulative share of adults, counties ordered from the most giving per adult to the least.
US counties: the first 10% of adults, in the highest-giving counties, account for 35.0% of individual donor dollars.
- Half of individual donor dollars from
- 18.1% of adults
- Gini of this curve
- 0.474
- Units
- 3,099 counties, weighted by adults
Each donor’s career giving (real 2024 dollars) is assigned to their most recent county. Counties are sorted from the most dollars per voting-age adult to the least and cumulated by adults, so the curve reads as people, not places: the first 18.1% of adults, all living in the highest-giving counties, supply half of the money, and 48.3% supply four-fifths. The Gini shown, 0.474, is the population-weighted Gini of dollars per adult: this curve’s own. The source’s headline 0.896 ranks county totals, which mixes county size with giving and does not describe this curve. This is a static cross-section of lifetime giving, not a trend; the source downsampled the curve to 60 vertices, and values between them are straight-line interpolations. Alaska is excluded.
Curve vertices · 60 rows
| Adults, cumulative (%) | Donor dollars, cumulative (%) |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0 |
| 5.67 | 26.85 |
| 17.34 | 48.8 |
| 23.52 | 57.3 |
| 28.2 | 62.72 |
| 32.32 | 67.01 |
| 36.87 | 71.29 |
| 39.55 | 73.59 |
| 42.98 | 76.28 |
| 44.72 | 77.55 |
| 48.06 | 79.83 |
| 52.8 | 82.84 |
| 55.15 | 84.27 |
| 57.41 | 85.56 |
| 58.46 | 86.14 |
| 59.49 | 86.68 |
| 60.7 | 87.29 |
| 63.54 | 88.69 |
| 65.33 | 89.54 |
| 67.3 | 90.44 |
Stanford DIME v4.0 donor geography × 2024 voting-age population · 3,099 counties
Reading notes
Counties are the unit, so a curve over individual donors would be steeper still. Each donor sits in their most recent county and dollars are career totals: a cross-section, not a trend. The Gini of 0.474 is this curve’s own; the source’s 0.896 ranks county totals.
Source & method
Stanford DIME v4.0 donor geography × 2024 voting-age population · 3,099 counties
Kept the population-weighted concentration curve of individual donor dollars across 3,099 counties: counties sorted from the highest career donor dollars per voting-age adult to the lowest, then cumulated as [share of adults, share of dollars]. The source downsampled it to 61 vertices; converted fractions to percent at two decimals and dropped a repeated origin vertex. Kept the supplied adult shares that hold half and 80% of dollars, and both of the source's Gini coefficients, because only one of them describes this curve: the population-weighted Gini of dollars per adult (0.474) is the curve's own (the capture recomputes 0.468 from the downsampled vertices), while the 0.896 county-total Gini ranks counties by their raw sums and so mixes county size with giving. Dropped the county map values, demographic correlates and education quartiles, which belong to other figures.
Capture provenance
- box:Politics / analysis/where-the-money-lives/data.json
- Modified 2026-06-28 · SHA-256 0bd073206a7d1c68acd4391ad6db3917373ec33f085cf0b7086faf52b062aabe
- Captured
- 2026-09-12
- Fixture SHA-256
- 1cb63992721b0dfcb2ee67caf514149acbabb86c439c5f34b20746984a2eff38
- Reuse note
- Aggregates of Stanford DIME v4.0 donor geography (Adam Bonica), research and non-commercial use; cite Bonica, DIME v4.0, Stanford University Libraries. County adult population is the 2024 voting-age population. Alaska is excluded by the source.
