The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets.
In the weeks since Abramoff confessed to defrauding tribes and enticing public officials with bribes, the question of whether Abramoff directed donations just to Republicans, or to the GOP and Democrats, has been central to efforts by both parties to distance themselves from the unfolding scandal. President Bush recently addressed the question on Fox News, saying: “It seems to me that he [Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.”
Although Abramoff hasn't personally given to any Democrats, Republicans, including officials with the GOP campaign to hold on to the Senate, have seized on the donations of his tribal clients as proof that the saga is a bipartisan scandal. And the controversy recently spread to the media when the ombudsman for The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, ignited a firestorm by wrongly asserting that Abramoff had given to both. She eventually amended her assessment, writing that Abramoff “directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”
But the Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it's highly misleading to suggest that the tribes's giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.
The analysis includes a detailed look at seven of Abramoff's tribal clients, and a comparison of their giving with that of approximately 170 other tribes. (Abramoff is often said to have had nine tribal clients. But Morris omitted two of the tribes – the Pueblo of Santa Clara, whose donations were virtually nonexistent, and the Tigua Indian Reservation, because it isn't listed in Federal lobbying files as having a lobbyist and Abramoff worked on contingency. At any rate Santa Clara's post-Abramoff donations to the GOP were overwhelmingly higher than to Dems, so including them would have added even more to the GOP side of the ledger.)
The analysis shows:
“It's very hard to see the donations of Abramoff's clients as a bipartisan greasing of the wheels,” Morris, the firm's founder and a former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, told The Prospect.
Bloomberg News published a similar, more limited analysis last month, which relied on a small amount of data also from Morris' firm.” But that analysis didn't look at all of Abramoff's tribal clients, and didn't provide a detailed year-by-year analysis of their donations or a detailed comparison to other tribal giving. Since then, some observers, such as blogger Kevin Drum, have argued that a comprehensive look at the donations of all of Abramoff's tribal clients would help shed light on the scandal.
The Prospect asked Morris to do two things: First, compare the contributions of all of Abramoff's tribal clients before they'd signed on with Abramoff versus after they'd become his client. And second, compare the contributions of all Abramoff tribal clients with the contributions of all non-Abramoff tribes.
Here are Abramoff's seven tribal clients, according to Morris' analysis, complete with their pre-Abramoff and post Abramoff contributions:
1) Tribe: Saginaw Chippewa (Michigan)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 9/2000): $371,250
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 9/2000): $285,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (9/2000 - 2003): $191,960
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (9/2000 - 2003): $401,500
2) Tribe: Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 9/2000): $61,320
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 9/2000): $48,560
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (9/2000 - 2003): $64,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP(9/2000 - 2003): $162,590
3) Tribe: Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 4/2001): $1,000
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 4/2001): $750
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (4/2001 - 6/2004): $40,500
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (4/2001 - 6/2004): $168,750
4) Tribe: Pueblo of Sandia (New Mexico)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 3/2002): $24,000
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 3/2002): $15,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (3/2002 - 6/2003): $18,500
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (3/2002 - 6/2003): $11,500
5) Tribe: Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians (California)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 7/2002): $371,250
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 7/2002): $400,200
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (7/2002 - 6/2004): $70,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (7/2002 - 6/2004): $216,708
6) Tribe: Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 1/2003): $35,470
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 1/2003): $6,050
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1/2003 - 12/2003): $250
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1/2003 - 12/2003): $0
7) Tribe: Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 1995): $4,600
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 1995): $31,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1995 - 2004): $409,273
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1995 - 2004): $884,927
As the above numbers show, four out of seven tribes -- Saginaw, Chitimacha, Coushatta and Mississippi – saw their contributions to Republicans increase significantly, even vastly, after they became Abramoff's clients.
At the same time, two of those four tribes -- Saginaw and Chitimacha -- saw their giving to Democrats drop or remain static. The other two -- tribes Coushatta and Mississippi -- did see their giving to Dems rise under Abramoff, but by amounts that were dwarfed by the increases in giving to the GOP.
These patterns strongly suggest that Abramoff's representation of the tribes manifested itself largely in a dramatic rise in contributions to the GOP. And it also suggests it's likely that Abramoff had little impact on giving to Democrats.
Nor does it appear likely that Abramoff steered contributions to Dems from the remaining three tribes who didn't see their giving to the GOP climb. Of those three tribes, one tribe -- Pueblo of Sandia -- saw a negligible shift in donations to both parties. The second -- Agua Caliente -- slashed its contributions to both parties, but even so, the percentage of that tribe's giving that went to Republicans still rose dramatically. The third -- Cherokee Nation -- simply stopped giving altogether.
The big picture is also compelling. Taken together, Abramoff's tribal clients gave $868,890 to Dems before hiring him; afterwards, they gave $794,483 -- a decrease of nine percent. By contrast, the tribes' donations to Republicans went from $786,560 pre-Abramoff to $1,845,975 after he became their lobbyist -- an increase of 135 percent. In other words, when Abramoff entered the picture, contributions to Dems dropped, while donations to Republicans more than doubled.
Adding to the case, the Morris firm also did a year-by-year analysis, from 1991 to the present, of the giving of scores of tribes -- Abramoff's clients included. The firm's look at the year-by-year giving of his clients is eye-opening. It shows even more clearly that in some cases clients' giving to the GOP jumped dramatically just after Abramoff signed them.
For example, the Saginaw Chippewa became Abramoff's client in late 2000, and in the election cycle that immediately followed, the tribe's giving to Republicans more than doubled -- from $78,000 to $167,000 -- while giving to Dems rose only $12,000.
“The giving of Indian tribes in general has increased dramatically over the last decade,” Morris told The Prospect. “But if you single out Abramoff's clients year by year, you can see that the giving increases far more to Republicans when Abramoff became their lobbyist.”
Finally, Morris did an extensive comparison of the donations of both Abramoff tribes and non-Abramoff tribes. Morris added up giving from 1991 to the present by virtually all of the approximately 170 tribes that gave politically but are not affiliated with the lobbyist.
The totals show that in the past 15 years, the tribes gave more than $15.5 million to Democrats and just over $6 million to the GOP -- well over twice as much to Democrats as to Republicans.
By contrast, if you total up all the contributions Abramoff's clients made, it comes to $1,845,975 to Republicans and $794,483 to Democrats -- well over twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats. So the pattern of giving of Abramoff's clients, who gave with far more generosity to Republicans, is almost exactly the reverse of that of virtually all other tribes not connected with Abramoff. Those tribes, by contrast, gave far more to Democrats.
“If you're going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination,” says Morris. “Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff's clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them.”
Note: The analysis The Prospect commissioned is available here. The first chart refers to the tribes' pre- and post-Abramoff donations. The second is the total giving of non-Abramoff tribes. The third is a year-by-year breakdown of tribal giving.
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, writes bi-weekly for The American Prospect. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.
Those critics, in an effort to discredit the whole piece and its conclusions about Abramoff's strongly Republican influence on the political donations of the Indian tribes he advised, have argued that we were wrong when we asserted that the donations to Democrats from Abramoff's tribal clients fell 9 percent after he became their lobbyist.
In the interest of accuracy, the Prospect asked Dwight Morris, the professional analyst who did the original research for our article, to take another look at the data. His conclusion is that the 9 percent figure -- an overall average which was based on our reading of his numbers -- can't be validated statistically; indeed, he thinks it's statistically invalid to do any before-and-after comparisons in this fashion.
But in reanalyzing the data, Morris came up with several new and perfectly sound ways to compare those numbers, and guess what: His new analysis demonstrates even more compellingly that when Abramoff came along, the ratio of Republican contributions over Democratic contributions soared dramatically. In other words, his latest conclusions offer even stronger proof that our original conclusions were accurate.
Morris also gave us a statement, which fully supports the conclusions of our article while taking issue with the headline. We never meant that headline to be taken literally. Indeed, the story's lede makes it clear that we weren't arguing that no contributions to Democrats rose under Abramoff; just that any uptick to them was dwarfed by the rise in donations to Republicans. Still, given the heat around this issue, it's possible that we should have written a different headline. Whatever Morris's misgivings about the headline, however, he clearly reaffirms that the data he provided fully support the main conclusions of the piece -- and regards the debate over the 9 percent figure as a distraction from those findings.
Statement by Dwight L. Morris, president of Dwight L. Morris & Associates:
Up to now I have remained largely on the sidelines of the “blog hysteria” surrounding the recent piece by Greg Sargent in the
Prospect on political donations by Native American tribes that were clients of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While neither the data we prepared nor the first paragraph of Sargent's piece support the story's headline, “Dems Don't Know Jack,” most of the criticism leveled at the piece deals with one small paragraph well down in the story. In part -- the offending part, apparently -- that paragraph states, “the donations by Abramoff's tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him.”
I can say two things about that figure: 1) it was not prepared by my firm because there is no statistically valid way to calculate this number given the way the data were compiled, and 2) focusing on it to the exclusion of all other data distorts the analysis laid out in the bulk of the piece.
As background, we were asked to document donations by the tribes from 1992 to the present (which at the time included part but not all of 2005). In doing so, we carefully researched the exact dates on which Abramoff began representing each tribe and the dates he ceased to represent them. We then divided the donations for each tribe into two pots: One pot represented the periods in which he did not represent the tribe; the second represented the periods in which he did represent it.
Based on our research, if I had written this piece rather than simply preparing the data, I would have pointed out the following calculations, which serve to buttress the piece's main thrust:
•Overall, the tribes gave a total of $1,663,400 to Democratic and Republican candidates and party committees during the periods when Abramoff did not represent them. Of that total, 53 percent was donated to Democratic candidates and party committees, and 47 percent was donated to their Republican counterparts.
•During the periods that Abramoff represented the tribes -- which spanned a considerably shorter timeframe than the “non-represented phase” -- the tribes collectively donated a total of $2,866,858 -- an increase of 72 percent when compared with the periods in which he did not represent them. Of that total, only 30 percent went to Democrats and 70 percent went to Republicans (see chart).
•In the periods when they were not represented by Abramoff, six of the eight tribes gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, although in several cases the difference was small.
•In the periods when Mr. Abramoff was their lobbyist, six of the tribes gave more -- and in each case significantly more -- to Republicans than to Democrats.
In short, whatever one thinks of the 9 percent figure, these numbers demonstrate the undeniably Republican shift in giving in a far more compelling way. The nature of the giving switched from marginally Democratic to significantly Republican. The data do not show that Abramoff steered no money to Democrats. Congressional testimony from tribal leaders themselves shows that he clearly did so. However, Sargent made no such claim. As his article puts it, “a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans.” That was and remains the central point of the piece, and if that did not come through, then hopefully the record has been set straight.
