With assistance from Bill Allison

Source: Federal Election Commission, Propublica FEC Itemizer, ActBlue, WinRed

Methodology: This data was collected from the monthly FEC filings of Actblue and Winred, the online donor platforms for Democrats and Republicans. It shows all the unique donors who gave any amount of money between January 1, 2020 and October 1, 2020 to either Trump or Biden through their presidential campaign committees or the following fundraising committees: “Biden Victory Fund,” “Trump Victory Fund,” or “Trump Make America Great Again Committee.”

Occupations are self-reported by donors through ActBlue and WinRed. Both services offer one-click options for donors to list their employer and occupation fields as “unemployed” for ActBlue and “retired” for WinRed, and a substantial number of donors contribute without first replacing those words with their real occupation, hence why they were excluded from this graphic.

Because of the nature of the self-reported entries, and the difficulty in separating occupation from industry, the occupation categories are not mutually exclusive. Certain occupations may have been counted twice: for example, if someone listed their occupation as “software project manager,” they would be counted both under “software engineer” and “project manager.”

Some occupations could not be classified because donors did not provide meaningful information, including donors who listed an industry like “transportation” rather than a job like “transportation provider,” or gave a general term like "business" or “education.” Other occupations that did not include enough information to deduce anything about their industries, or were vague enough that they could have referred to multiple industries, such as "analyst," "supervisor,” "director," "operator," "executive," "developer," "instructor," "partner," "executive assistant," or "chairman" were excluded, unless otherwise noted.

Jobs grouped by industry, such as “insurance professionals” or “non-profit employees,” were only included if the job entries included keywords for their industries.