A few of my colleagues and I here at Spotfire are political junkies, and with the primary campaigns running so long, there's been a lot to take in.  One of the conversations we've been having recently touches on the vastly greater number of people participating in the primaries this year, and in particular, the fact that the number of people donating to candidates in the primary is many times greater than it has been in previous cycles.

In order to see what sort of impact this has had, we threw data from the FEC into Spotfire, and took a look.  What we found was pretty interesting.  Some of it's been written up by the Huffington Post today:

But if the fundraising statistics from key battleground states provide any indication of popular support, both Democratic candidates seem well positioned to take on their GOP competitor come November.

According to data compiled by Spotfire Division of software firm TIBCO, Obama and Clinton have raised nearly twice as much as McCain in the traditionally important electoral states through the February filing period.

The interesting insight here is that with the high-volume, small-scale donations enabled by modern campaign architecture, the numbers of people giving money may serve as a good proxy for levels of voter support.  You can take a look at our analysis here, but based on our analysis, we would have been able to call Texas and Ohio for Clinton a good month before the elections, and are currently picking Clinton in a tight win over Obama in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.