I originally wrote about this on my own blog, frustrated by the continued portrait of the Abramoff scandal as bi-partisan. Although
Happy Monkey has the right idea, I think it's more helpful to see donations tracked over time. Fortunately,
TAP provides enough detail that we can use to chart out 12 years of contributions from all Indian tribes, and use that to illustrate the dramatic changes in political contributions from clients of Jack Abramoff. A powerful story, told in four simple charts.
The first is meant to illustrate that, in general, giving from Indian tribes increased dramatically in the mid-nineties. Pulling data from about 170 tribes nationwide, you can see that, in general, they have favored contributions to Democrats. We'll cover that in more detail later. This chart is about context: with or without Abramoff, tribes donated a great deal of money to both political parties.
From the chart above, you can see that donations to Republicans were a small fraction of those given to Democrats prior to 1998. The chart below illustrates this with greater clarity, focusing only on the percentages, and not the actual amounts given. While starting to trend toward more balanced contributions toward both parties in 1998, Democrats never received less than 60% of tribal donations during presidential election years.
What can we deduce from this? That, as a general rule, Indian tribes have strongly favored the Democratic party in their political donations over the past twelve years. 67% to 33% to be exact, or about $17.1 million to Democrats since 1992, and $8.4 million to Republicans.
Now. The third chart is roughly the same as the second, except that all Abramoff client tribes have been removed. You'll notice that they aren't much different. The gap between the blue and red lines is a bit wider after 2000.
Which sets the stage for the last chart. Only Abramoff client tribes. What happened in 2000 and 2002, and, to a lesser extent, 2004? In 2000 alone, which party received 70% of political donations from these seven tribes, compared to 25% from all other tribes in the country? And conversely, which party saw their donations plummet from 75% from 164 tribes to only 30% from 7 Abramoff client tribes?
What was it that happened in 2000 again? What could possibly explain account for such a dramatic shift in tribal political donations? Who could have possibly benefited from those dollars in one of the most closely contested presidential elections in our nation's history?
When one party so clearly benefits from the political contributions of a particular lobbyist's clientele, one might suggest that this is, indeed, "a Republican scandal."