With less than a week remaining for the special elections for Georgia's 6th Congressional District, the AJC decided to look at where donations are coming from.
To answer this question, we combed through Federal Election Commission campaign filings for five candidates -- Democrat Jon Ossoff, and Republicans Dan Moody, Bob Gray, Judson Hill and Karen Handel -- to produce this analyses.
These reports contain itemized donations with detailed information about the donor’s city and state. However, the FEC does not require donations below $200 to be itemized, which means there is no information available about those donors. (Ossoff’s campaign, for instance, raised more than $5.6 million in unitemized donations). Our analysis is restricted to itemized individual donations only.
Overall, Ossoff has raised more than $8.3 million. His closest competitor is Republican Dan Moody, who has raised $2 million, of which Moody loaned $1.9 million of his own money to his campaign. Bob Gray, another Republican, contributed $500,000 as a candidate loan to his campaign.
Ossoff got 20 percent of his individual donations from California, 16 percent from New York, 6 percent from Massachusetts and 3 percent from Illinois. All told, Ossoff raked in more than $2.5 million through individual donors. He received contributions from every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia.
No other candidate has raised such large sums of money from out-of-state donors. All other Republican candidates reported majority individual donors from Georgia.
Bob Gray reported donors from the District of Columbia and states like Arkansas, Florida, Massachusetts, California and Texas, besides $119,950 from Georgia.
Judson Hill received $344,047 from Georgia and smaller sums from Florida, D.C., Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia. Handel received $345,787, nearly 90 percent, from Georgia.
Note: The FEC has not released itemized individual donations for Ossoff. We used his April 6 filings for our calculations.
