for your vote 2018 candidates are busy fundraising for their campaigns in the
race for governor the Arizona public media data team looked at the top three
candidates who raised the most money by the end of last year and where most of
those donations came from the three best known candidates for governor are
Governor Doug Ducey state senator Steve Farley and David Garcia who ran for
Arizona Supervisor of Public Instruction in 2014 governor Ducey came in to 2018
with the most money in his campaign account 2.6 million dollars Senator
Farley began the year with not quite a quarter million dollars in the bank and
David Garcia had just shy of $95,000 but digging deeper we learn a bit about the
campaign's a third of the contributions to the Ducey reelection campaign in 2017
came from private industry executives people who listed their occupation as
CEO owner president for example the amount that that group gave was close to
$800,000 for candidate Farley that group donated about $65,000 making up 13% of
Farley's total last year executives gave Garcia $40,000 making up 8% of his
donations all three candidates had one thing in common
retirees are either the number one or number two largest group giving them
money with Steve Farley retirees made up a third of his donors officials with
AARP say those numbers are not surprising because retirees tend to be
politically engaged the data also show where candidates get their money
our team looked at all donations but focused on in-state contributions the
red on the map represents zip codes where people contributed to one of the
gubernatorial candidates in 2017 Paradise Valley in Scottsdale are where
the majority of Ducey campaign donors live Steve Farley draws heavily from his
tucson legislative district David Garcia draws most heavily from the urban center
of Phoenix and Tempe which traditionally leans Democratic as conventional wisdom
goes the candidate with the most money usually wins however research from the
University of Arizona School of Information indicates the emergence of a
new type of campaign Kern see on social media a few weeks ago we
spoke to Professor Yotam Smargad who explained how certain endorsements on
Twitter potentially swayed voters in federal races all we're seeing is that
if you're at a financial disadvantage and on average the people who share your
message are popular they have a lot of retweets they have a lot of favorites on
their on their own posts then you can do better at the polls in some cases people
actually overcome and and win in a race where they're at a financial
disadvantage but usually it just gets you closer and closer money still
outweighs social media president Trump he's very active on Twitter so if you
get him involved I mean you're almost well ahead of any competition yeah you
know I have not seen Trump in there as as a big hub for people that's not to
say that he's not in the data set it's it's a large data set and we haven't
gone through everything but we've started by looking at races that you'd
expect would go one way and ended up going another way and seeing who the
influencers in those races were and Donald Trump has not appeared there it's
a lot of accounts that you wouldn't expect so just off the top of my head
revolve is one account that pops up all the time some of these accounts are a
little bit less obvious they have the potential to really cause an impact to
an election yeah what our data is showing is that there are these sort of
silent hubs that and they're not silent in some ways because they have a lot of
followership sand they get their messages get shared but there's also
this sort of broader question which is are these endorsements reflecting just
things that are happening on Twitter or are they reflecting some more
traditional media exposure that's associated with these endorsements or
that is created as a result of these endorsements here Arizona is a
conservative stronghold are we seen any candidates or anybody of note yet that
has sort of aligned themselves with perhaps President Trump that's given
them some traction in their campaign I think it's too early to tell how people
are how well people are going to do I mean we haven't even run into the
primaries yet I think once the once the August rolls around then we'll start
seeing who the major players are and you know I'll be looking very carefully at
their social media behavior so I'm here we are in the spring we'll have a
special election later this and then come the August primaries what
are you seeing as far as trends are concerned for social media here in
Arizona the big stories around social media right now are not so much around
endorsements but around targeted advertising so so the the counter to
what I've been talking about which is you know if you don't have money you can
use social media to to close the gap there's the other side of it which is
that social media can actually be used to overwhelm a financially disadvantaged
competitor simply because you have more resources to personalize and target
messages to particular constituents so I think we're going to see quite a bit
more of that