Today's Head Scratcher: Hsu-Greased Pols Lining Up Behind Clinton

[Important, confusing update/correction below]

The Hill has compiled an updated roster of Congressional endorsements of Presidential candidates (HT: Matt Lewis).  Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton is out in front, with 59 Representatives, 9 Senators, and one non-voting Delegate in her corner.  That gives Clinton 3/4 of the Senatorial endorsements and just over half of the House endorsements announced to date.

Here are a few other statistics worth a ponder.

15% of Hillary's House and Senate endorsers (10 of 68) received tainted contributions from Norman Hsu's donor network, compared to 7.5% (40 of 535) of all current Congress members.  A majority of her Senatorial endorsements (a whopping 56%) received Hsu money, compared to 28% of all current Senators.

That means legislators who threw their weight behind Clinton were twice as likely to be greased by Hsu as their average colleague.

(The percentage of Obama endorsers who received Hsu's support rate was not meaningfully different from the Congress-wide rate (7.7% vs. 7.5%) and not a single Edwards backer saw Hsu money.)

Likewise, Hsu-gilded legislators backed Clinton with roughly twice the frequency (25%) as Congress on the whole (12.7%).  Hsu's beneficiaries were 5x likelier to endorse Clinton than Obama (25% vs. 5%), while her endorsement advantage Congress-wide over Obama is only 2.6x.

Whatever causal link may lie behind the divergence is of course left to one's imagination.  The pattern does lead the more feverishly conspiratorial to wonder whether the seemingly scatter-shot dispersal of Hsu's support among dozens of candidates may have served a more focused end, such as the elevation of a single candidate for whom those recipients may have later had an opportunity to toss an endorsement.

But it's equally possible that Norman Hsu simply admires politicians who admire Hillary Clinton and that he chose to support them without so much as the most tacit of quid pro quos.

Or it could be a little of both.

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Update:  Oh, that's a little embarrassing.  It turns out I neglected to strip out the Republicans from the comparison.  When you do that, the differential between Hillary's support among Hsu recipients and Congress on the whole shrinks (roughly by half, substantially negating the 2:1 differential).  So while Hsu recipients are indeed twice as likely to endorse Hillary, that's primarily explained by the fact that Hsu gave no money to Congressional Republicans.  So all of the above is accurate; it's just not terribly meaningful.

A thousand apologies for the sloppy error, but rest assured the data make a similar point, even when you don't make this goof.

If you constrain the comparison population to Congressional Democrats, the key correlation holds.  The differential in Hillary's endorsement frequency among Hsu recipients vs. all Congressional Democrats (+1%) is significantly greater than the differential for Obama (-4%), Edwards (-5%), or all non-Hillary endorsees (-13%).

Another way to look at it (perhaps the most revealing way, and certainly a simpler way than the little roundabout we just went round) is to compare the percentage of endorsing Hsu recipients who endorsed Clinton versus the percentage of endorsing Democratic legislators who endorsed Clinton.  That gets us boiled back down to a single comparison of percentages - in this case 77% (10/13) vs. 54% (68/127), enough to illustrate the strong correlation (but not enough to dampen the shame).

Sorry again for the unnecessarily circuitous numerical journey.  I'd go and scrub up the post so it reads more cleanly, but documenting and rectifying our errors is what separates us from the animals.

And the mainstream media.