Who is funding the governor's race...

The Texas Tribune is doing some of the only reporting on who is giving what to whom (link). Excerpt follows...

Retirees, homemakers, executives and lawyers were among the most common campaign donors in 2009 to candidates in the governor's race, according to the latest ethics filings.

Some groups clearly have their favorites, though.

To find the most-common occupations among the thousands of people who've donated to the candidates in the last year, we created word clouds, a visualization technique that boosts the size of words depending on their frequency. In this case, we clustered donor occupations listed by the campaigns based on filings with the Texas Ethics Commission.

The analysis isn't perfect, of course. We excluded donations smaller than $500 for the major candidates because state law doesn't require occupations to be listed under that amount. The data also aren't uniformly reported by campaigns (CEO, C.E.O., chief executive officer, for example, aren't clustered together), which leaves some occupations underrepresented. And, finally, the layout is created randomly by an algorithm, so it isn't consistent in each cloud.

Bill White's cloud is dominated by "Attorney" which is not surprising... Rick and Kay have a much small "Attorney" imprint on their wordles... although Kay's Attorney imprint is bigger than Rick's...

Rick's "Best Efforts" is bigger than Kay's meanwhile...

Kudos to the Texas Tribune... this kind of analysis is found almost nowhere else...