Super PACs have been all over the news since the Citizens United decision in January of 2010. They’ve been an even hotter topic recently because of last week’s disclosure deadline and the President’s “friendlier posture” toward Super PACs that hit the newswire today. There’s plenty of analysis of the disclosure data (all donations >=$200) out there already — a quick search turns up coverage of Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, and so on. Take a look. Just watch out for trolls.

I thought to take a look at the data myself to see what we could find. OpenSecrets.org has the data in a very accessible format. Here, for example, is a list of donations to “Restore Our Future”. I pulled down detailed data for the 19 largest Super PACs by total amount raised. At the bottom of that list is Colbert’s “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.”

Of these 19 Super PACs, 8 are categorized as having a “Liberal” viewpoint, 8 are “Conservative”, and 3 are purportedly nonpartisan. These Super PACs represented about $85M of contributions. In total, OpenSecrets lists 313 Super PACs that have received $99M of contributions, so we’ve got the lion’s share.

Now that we’re clear on the raw data, let’s get to the good stuff: the visuals. Once again, I’m using R, so the graphs are a little ugly. But they get the point across. Donations by “viewpoint” of the Super PAC, as listed by OpenSecrets:

Ok, no surprises here. We’re knee deep in a Republication primary, which is probably why conservative spending is 3.2 times liberal spending. How about donation size? Let’s look at that two ways. First, a histogram:

Next — and probably more telling — a simple line chart:

Curious about those whoppers? I am. First, though, it’s interesting to note the following: donations of less than $1,000 accounted for 49.7% of all donations by count, but only 0.4% of the total dollars. The top 10% of donations made up 75.8% of the total dollars, while all donations $1M or greater (17 in total, or 1.1%) accounted for 28.3% of the overall haul. The message is clear: Super PACs are all about the big money.

With some inspiration from @heflopod, I was also able to generate a matrix of donation histograms for each PAC. This gives you a sense of whether donations to a given Super PAC tended to be small, large, or both. Colbert’s Super PAC, for example, sees mostly smaller donations, while American Crossroads has (roughly) one larger donation for ever four small ones. Note that the x axis is log(donation size), while the y axis is a count.

Now, on to the whoppers. The top 3 “liberal” donations were:

• Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks), $2M to the “Obama” PAC.
• The AFL-CIO, >$1M to its own Super PAC.
• Dr. Amy Goldman (author), $1M to Planned Parenthood Votes.

Top 3 “conservative” donations:

• Harold Simmons (controls 5 NYSE-listed companies), $5M to the “Karl Rove” PAC. Note that Simmons (and Bob Perry, for that matter) gave to more than one Super PAC.
• Jerry Perenchio (former CEO of Univision), $2M to the “Karl Rove” PAC.
• Bob Perry (owner of Perry Homes), $2M to the “Karl Rove” PAC.
• Also of interest to tech readers: Peter Thiel gave $900K to the “Ron Paul” PAC.

Top 3 “non-partisan” donations:

• Joe Ricketts (former TD Ameritrade CEO), $500K to the Campaign for Primary Accountability
• Leo Linbeck III (consultant), $500K to the Campaign for Primary Accountability
• Tim Dunn (CEO of CrownQuest), $350K to the Campaign for Primary Accountability

This is just the start, obviously. I anticipate returning to this topic again in the coming months. As we get closer to the general election — and as Super PACs disclose more and more data — I suspect we’ll see some interesting (and in many cases, disturbing) trends. 

R source code is as follows: