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.美国两大政党的全国提名大会（U.S. major party national nominating conventions）是政党为即将到来的总统与国会选举塑造品牌、传递竞选信息的核心平台。此类大会同时可为举办城市带来营收与媒体关注度，因此近数十年来，大会筹款规模大幅增长。2014年，大会筹款规则迎来修订：政党竞选基金的捐款上限提升至原标准的三倍，同时取消了针对主办委员会的捐款限制。尽管我们预计此次规则调整不会对个人捐赠者产生影响，但我们推测企业、银行与工会已开始利用这些新规，以及此前无法通过此类渠道获取筹款的政党资源。为验证这一推测，我们收集了2000年至2024年选举周期内的提名大会筹款报告。我们梳理了2014年规则调整以来政党大会筹款的发展态势，重点关注主办城市与政党的大会筹款特征，并进一步聚焦主办委员会的捐赠群体——包括其其他捐赠行为、与候选人、政党委员会及主办城市的关联——同时梳理可能由提名候选人或主办城市引发的筹款差异。尽管提名大会筹款法律已迎来调整，但我们发现，主办城市与政党仍在筹集巨额资金以承办全国提名大会。研究结果表明，政党已将公共筹款替换为私人筹款，但并未降低主办城市的筹款预期。我们的研究还显示，近期的法律修订、总统提名大会重要性的式微，以及当前的政治环境，并未加深主办城市对准入型捐赠者（access donors）的依赖。事实上，两极分化的政治环境以及共和党内部唐纳德·特朗普的崛起，似乎降低了主办委员会对准入型捐赠者的重视程度。