PORTLAND, Maine — Maine residents have put almost $2.7 million into this year’s presidential contest. More than half went to candidates who have already dropped out.
With the election weeks away, looking back at the early contributions from Maine shows just how much the state’s most politically active citizens hoped that two other candidates would be closing out the final presidential debate Wednesday night.
The Bangor Daily News analyzed and cleaned data on in-state donors who have given more than $200 to presidential candidates in this election cycle, through the end of August. The most frequent contributors mostly gave money to Democratic candidates.
And among the top 100 most frequent political contributors disclosed from Maine this year, none gave to Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
That frequency of donations leading up to the party caucuses appears to align with real support at the ballot box. A look at candidates with the most loyal donors through February 2016 pointed to the eventual winners in Maine, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
One contributor to Sanders’ campaign, a library assistant at the Bangor Public Library, gave 252 separate donations.
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Between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Trump, the overall money race is heavily lopsided in Maine, with Clinton benefitting from 24 donors who maxed out in Maine, each giving a total of $5,400 across the primary and general election contests.
By contrast, nine donors gave the maximum to Sanders during the primary and just three have given the maximum amount to Trump. Financial disclosures through September are due by a deadline of midnight Thursday.
See individual donors to each candidate — who raised at least $10,000 in Maine — using the interactive dashboard below.
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Scour the full data set of itemized campaign contributions from Maine below or here. The Bangor Daily News cleaned the data set to remove typos and inconsistent formatting of names, but errors may persist. Email dfishell@bangordailynews.com with any corrections or inquiries about the data.