No Obvious Political Bias In Chrysler Dealership Closings

Update: Blogger Marla Singer at Zero Hedge did some actual statistcs on the entire dealer open and closing list, and found a small correlation between open dealers and donations to Hillary Clinton's campaign, but not a very significant difference between Democrat and Republican giving overall (0.93 vs 1.05 odds ratio of being closed, D vs R).

The blogger Doug Ross did some digging, and discovered that very few of the Chrysler dealers on the closing list gave political contributions to the Democrats in the last election cycle, and most of the ones that did give gave to Republicans.

In his original post (here), Ross found that out of a collection of 39 dealers he checked, 4 gave half or more of their contributions to Democrats (10%)

As much as I would like to believe it to be true, I don't think it is. There is a major flaw with his analysis: he didn't bother to check the dealers that are staying open to see how their political contributions broke down.

My hypothesis is that Chrysler dealers, being small businessmen, are more likely to donate to Republicans than Democrats, for predictable reasons. Like any small businessmen, car dealers want lower taxes, a lower minimum wage, fewer regulations, etc.

The list of Chrysler dealers that are staying open is here. This is a list of the dealers whose contracts will be assumed by the new Chrysler-Fiat.

What I did was go down the list and copy names into the search box at OpenSecrets.org until I got a clean hit. I did this until I got 25 dealers with donation records for the 2008 election cycle. The results can be considered randomized, since we don't expect a correlation in the alphabetical name of the dealership with their political affiliation (or geographic location).

Result: 23 dealer principals donated to Republicans, 2 donated to Democrats, or about 10%.

If you run these numbers through a binomial distribution, you get a 2-tailed P-value of 1! That means that the hypothesis that the two distributions are identical is correct. Chrysler dealers (and probably all auto dealers) who donated for the 2008 election cycle overwhelmingly supported the Republicans.

Here is my "raw data", if you want to spot check me.

DEEBY	R
AKINS	R
SMITH	R
MELLOY	R
SANZI	R
MCKAY	R
SIX	R
UDD	R
ANCIRA	R
ANDERSON	R
NOKES	R
HOSSLER	R
MAROONE	R
MORELAND	R
HADDAD	R
ALBRO	R
THOMASON	D
WYANT	R
BAUMANN	R
LANPHERE	R
SPITZER	D
BENSON	R
BERGERON	R
BERGSTROM	R
GERBAZ	R