Political donors

Have you ever wondered who in Cheshire donates money to political campaigns?

Here's the link to the official FEC website. If you enter the "zipcode" and "date range," you can see that over $42,000 has already gone to federal elections from Cheshire residents in 2007. Most astonishing to me is the nearly $18,000 from Greg Melville... not that there's anything wrong with that. I wouldn't mind if I had more money to donate to Ron Paul... it's just that it surprised me. If you go back a few years though, you'll see Cheshire has an even bigger donor... Ed Tufte. He's given over $50,000 in the past decade.

wow

However, the website is an incomplete list of all donors. I'm pretty sure that this website includes only people who have donated in excess of $250 (in aggregate). For example, I've donated $100 to Ron Paul. But my name doesn't appear... even though some people may be included with dollar amounts less than $100. I'm guessing that after you donate $250, then all of your donations appear.

As for who has the most Cheshire donors... Chris Murphy is leading the way. That's really not that surprising, considering he personally knows people here in Cheshire. Then Joe Courtney (who seems like a nice, soft spoken gentleman... I met him once) has the second most donors. Again, that's not particularly surprising... I think his brother lives in town. And finally come the Presidential candidates. If I counted right, their number of Cheshire donors is:

Chris Dodd: 3
Barack Obama: 2
John Edwards: 2
John McCain: 1
Hillary Clinton: 1
Bill Richardson: it appears that someone donated, then got their money back?

Tim White