How I answered the questions is described as follows

1. Which industries contributed the most to the Republican and Democratic parties? How much was contributed to each party?

   • Answer: Republican/Conservative for the Republican Party, Media/Entertainment for the Democratic Party. $21,553,578.00 was given to the Democratic Party, while $30,749,000.00 to the Republican Party.
   • How I did it
     • I formatted the Amount tab to currency. Otherwise, the amount is not treated as currency, but as text.
     • I created a pivot table and applied Industry as the row, Party as column, and Amount as values (as both default and % of the grand total).
     • I found that Republican/Conservative was the industry that contributed the most to either of the parties. They contributed 14% or $7,514,000.00 to the Republican Party. The same group also contributed the most to the Republican Party; none of its money was donated to the Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, the Media/Entertainment industry was the top contributor, donating $1,880,000.00 to the party.

2. How much did donors from the Misc. Business sector contribute to the Democratic party? Which donors were based in Miami Lakes, FL?

   • Answer: $3,520,000.00; Windmere Corp.
   • How I did it
     • On the Pivot Table tab, I replaced Industry with Sector as column. I found that the Misc. Business contributed $3,520,000.00 to the Democratic Party.
     • On the same Pivot Table, I used City as row and Donor as values. I found that there are only one donor from Miami Lakes, FL which donated $100,000 to the Democratic Party twice. The donor’s name is Windmere Corp.

3. What percentage of the tobacco industry’s donations does Philip Morris account for? How much is it?

   • Answer: 68.54%; $2,070,000.00
   • How I did it
     • On the Pivot Table tab, I used Industry as row and Amount as values. From the resultant table, I clicked on the Amount ($3,020,000.00) that the Tobacco industry contributed to. It created a new tab where all the donors belonging to the tobacco industry. I created another Pivot Table, where I used Donor as row and Amount as values (% of the grand total). I found that both the amount and perchantage of Philip Morris’ contributions.

4. Describe (in two to three sentences — no need for a detailed story pitch) one potential story from this dataset that you’d find promising if this were a project you were working on. Give it a headline. Include up to three types of sources you would call to report out the story and a few of the questions you might ask. (These can be bullet points — no need for a long explanation.) Remember to detail the steps you took in analyzing the data to get to the story idea. Use the skills we’ve learned to help you.

• Headline: How parties helped or defied their donors; it would be an explanatory story which would try to explain whether the parties favored or defied the industries or sectors that donated them. I will analyze the parties’ voting and legislation records by the amount of money they received from each sector. I would call the Public Citizen, which keeps track of influence peddling in the government. I'd filter the amount of money parties received from different sectors and industries; and then find out the legislations involving different sectors that these parties pushed or opposed.

5. What data might be suitable to join with this data to provide context or additional stories? Give me two examples.

• Congress voting records data by party lines; the donation details of each congressional candidates of the parites.