UPDATE: Mike Wessler, communications specialist for the National Institute on Money in State Politics, offers this explanation via email for the discrepancies I noted in their study.

“I think most of the discrepancy is due to the fact that we still have 2009 data from Virginia coming into our system. We designed our “Recovery Watch” tool so that it was an ongoing examination of the ARRA data. So as we get new data (either contribution data or ARRA contract data) the numbers change dynamically. So, because we have not been able to collect and standardize all of the data from Virginia the numbers will be slightly off. Once all of the data is into our system the numbers should match up. I hope this clears up any confusion about this.”

Conservative pundits don’t need any Christmas gifts this year. They’ve already been feasting on a year-round diet of stimulus snafus, whether real or imagined…with many more to come, I’m sure. Isn’t it true that politicians’ loss is gain for their respective commentating community?

But here’s a study that could throw a tiny bit of water on the fire (or fan the flames), done by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. They took a look at the campaign donations given by recipients of stimulus-funded contracts and found that only 3.2 percent gave to state-level political campaigns during 2008 and 2009. The contracts given to these donors account for 21.3 percent of the total being spent on stimulus contracts.

Of the 3,285 contract recipients, the Institute was able to identify 104 that had given to state election campaigns in any of the 50 states. Those 104 recipients contributed a total of $5,074,323 to state level candidates and party committees in the states where they received contracts, and were awarded a total of $3,604,010,850 in ARRA contracts.

And for Virginia? The study gives a 10.4 percentage:

Of the 183 contract recipients, the Institute was able to identify 19 that had given to state election campaigns in any of the 50 states. Those 19 recipients contributed a total of $275,935 to state level candidates and party committees in the states where they received contracts, and were awarded a total of $59,732,591 in ARRA contracts.

But when I ran these companies on the Virginia Public Access Project, I found that fewer companies donated more money than the study claims. According to VPAP, five companies gave $253,567 to state-level campaigns over the last two years. Hmm…I’ll be doing some more research on this one.

The companies and their donations are as follows:

Orbital Sciences Corp: $29,500

Northrop Grumman: $217,198

Deloitte & Touche: $5,500

AECOM Technology Corp: $369

Parsons Brinckerhoff: $1,000