Lawyers, guns and money – again
Previously, we examined how gun-rights voting records correlate with campaign contributions from lawyers and law firms during the 2004 election cycle. This bias appears to remain in force for the 2006 cycle.
According to the most recent Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) data, lawyers have retaken first place as the largest industry donor at $68,529,030, having dropped to second in the 2004 election after holding first place since the CRP began collecting campaign contribution data. Recent lawyer/law firm contributions heavily favor Democrats ($47,577,820 to Republicans’ $20,786,462), though the percentage of total contributions dropped from 74.5% in 2004 to 69.4% at present. Historically, this industry group has averaged 72.0% Democrat in its campaign contributions, varying between 68.9% and 74.5% from 1990–2006, thus the 2004/2006 variation does not indicate some new trend.
