Last week, Beto For Texas, the campaign for Texas’ Democratic United States Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, reported $38.1 million from 802,836 individual contributions in the third quarter alone.
Candidates O’Rourke and Senator Ted Cruz are set to turn in their Q3 donation information to the Federal Election Commission today. Currently, available data on the FEC’s website only goes through the second quarter of this year.
Ahead of Q3 reports for Beto For Texas and Ted Cruz For Texas, here’s a look at where out-of-state individual contributions stood at the end of the second quarter, with dates ranging from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018:
Of O’Rourke’s 12,089 individual donations, 2,658 of them came from out-of-state or out-of-country donors, accounting for about $2.4 million of his total $7,221,118 in individual donations.
Cruz received 40,456 individual, out-of-state or out-of-country donations that combined for a total of about $3.6 million – just over $1.2 million more from non-Texans than O’Rourke.
You can see a full list of contributions by state broken down by the total amount given and the total amount of donors here.
California- and New-York-based celebrities and business leaders have publicly declared their support of O’Rourke, and individual donor data pulled from the FEC shows a slew of recognizable names that contributed to O’Rourke’s campaigns for the primary and general elections.
Donations from Bravo’s Andy Cohen, George Soros, Soul Cycle Founder Elizabeth Cutler, Ike Barinholtz – actor and writer of Mad TV and The Mindy Project fame – and others came in for the Democratic contender.
So, how much are non-Texans swaying Texas’ campaign dollars for our senate race?
In total, Cruz’s primary and general elections campaigns earned 68,651 individual donations for a total of $7,286,851, just over $65,000 more than O’Rourke.
On average, Cruz’s out-of-state donors gave about $89 per individual donation, while O’Rourke’s gave about $908.
There are a few reasons why Cruz has both a higher number of individual donations and a lower average donation amount that can be observed in the data, which solely shows donations made by individual contributors and eliminates money from political action committees or joint fundraising committees.
Based on the data pulled by the Dallas Business Journal’s parent company American City Business Journals, Cruz’s donors appear to be recurring, small amount donors – possibly through pledged contributions – to either or both the primary and general elections. O’Rourke’s donors are more frequently one-time, lump-sum donors to either the primary or general elections.
Once you strip out out-of-state donations between July 1, 2017, and June 30, 2018, that leaves individual donations stemming from Texas addresses to a total of 9,431 for O’Rourke and 28,195 for Cruz.
From Texans, O’Rourke received more than $4.8 million in individual donations in primary and general campaign dollars. Texans donated about $3.66 million to Cruz.
The state most heavily invested in Texas’ senate race might not come as a surprise. Between individual donations to O’Rourke and Cruz’s campaigns, Californians gave more than $1.35 million. Cruz’s campaign received $504,761 from 6,203 individual donations and O’Rourke received $850,291 from 898 individual donations.
“Attorney” was the most prevalent occupation for O’Rourke’s out-of-state donors, where the occupation most represented by Cruz’s out-of-state donations was listed as “retired.”
Cruz received donations from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and O’Rourke received donations from 41 states, in addition to Washington, D.C., during the allotted time frame.
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