Replication Data for: The Decline of Access Donors in Funding National Nominating Conventions

The U.S. major party national nominating conventions are an essential platform for a party’s branding and messaging for the upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The conventions can also provide revenue and media attention to their host cities, and consequently, convention fundraising has grown substantially in recent decades. Convention fundraising rules were changed in 2014, tripling the limit for contributions to the party campaign funds and removing limits on contributions to host committees. Although we do not expect these changes to affect individual donors, we expect corporations, banks, and labor unions to have taken advantage of these new rules and the political parties that have been cut off from this source of fundraising in the past. To determine this, nominating convention funding reports were collected for the 2000 - 2024 election cycles. We consider the development in party convention fundraising since 2014, focusing on the characteristics of convention fundraising by the host cities and political party with a focus on the donors to the host committees– their other contributions, their relationships to candidates, party committees, and the host cities – and notes variations that might be attributable to the nominees or the host cities. Despite changes to convention fundraising laws, we find that host cities and political parties continue to raise large sums of money to pay for nominating conventions. These findings suggest that parties have replaced their public funds with private funds but have not reduced the fundraising expectations of the host cities. Our findings also suggest that recent changes in the law, the waning importance of presidential nominating conventions, and the current political environment have not deepened host cities’ reliance on access donors. In fact, the polarizing political environment and the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican Party seem to have reduced the prominence of access-oriented donors to host committees.