Josh has you taking a look at big ticket local contributions to the presidential campaign [mb] but what I find at least as (if not more) is taking a look at contributions to local political races. The City of Seattle’s Ethics and Elections office offers up to you the chance to see who is contributing what to which campaigns for political office or potential law. By checking out their page on Elections 2007, it is possible to learn a great deal about our local elections.

The largest contributor to Jean Godden’s campaign appears to be Godden herself. Rival candidate has a number of contributions from the Green Party, which is no surprise; the other names that pop up more than once might be friends or family members. The largest area from which Szawa got contributions was from Green Lake and the U-District; Godden’s largest funding source area was out of town. This seems fairly common–the largest group of contributors to the campaigns of Venus Velazquez, Tom Rasmussen, David Della, and just about everyone else come from “Out of Seattle”. The exception, sort of, is Sally Clark–the majority of her funds come from “Previous Campaign” which probably does include “Out of Seattle” funds, I’ve just not checked that out yet. I would assume that generally those sort of contributions come from people with some sort of close association with the city even though they don’t live in it–people who live in Shoreline but work downtown or have a house in Bellevue and a business in Northgate or what-have-you, but it mght be interesting to go through the detailed reports and see if this holds true or not.

There really is a great deal of information about the finances of the campaigns available on the page and as an added bonus contact information, including e-mail addresses and websites, is all there for you. Check it out.