My husband and I have been debating the significance of Barack Obama's million donor success. I am really hoping to convince him to vote for Obama in the fall, as he did for our primary. But he is suspicious of the significance of the "individual donor" aspect of this feat. His argument is that, like any campaign in our present system, Obama likely has lots of corporate support via collections of individual donors. So I went to Wikipedia to read up on campaign finance in the United States.
The Wikipedia entry outlines the differences between soft and hard money and goes onto to describe bundling, a process whereby bundlers "can gather contributions from many individuals in an organization or community, and present the sum to the campaign." The entry even refers to the Norman Hsu, Hillraisers fiasco.
I am presuming it is through this mechanism that corporations throw their weight behind specific candidates, or hedge their bets and donate to all.
So my question is this: how do such bundles get identified? Is the individual contribution data crunched to identify groups of people related by workplace? Or is there a more explicit way this information is filed?
Sorry if this diary seems a little wet around the ears. I just know that I'll get good answers here and ammunition for discussing this with dear hubby.
*Disclaimer: I know Wikipedia is not the be all, end all. I teach my students that "it's a start!"