It's fun to mull things like Facebook likes when trying to determine who the Bay Area prefers as their 2016 presidential candidate, but a "like" (or reaction, whatever) don't cost a thing. Donations to candidates, however, do — and they're arguably one of the best ways to determine voter support until we're actually counting ballots. That's why we asked Shane Leese, a Data Scientist at apartment-hunting website RentHop, to make us a map that contains the current 2016 presidential campaign contributions for all nine Bay Area counties. He found a lot of interesting stuff!

• Hillary Clinton is #1 in Bay Area donations, due to a number of "large donors" including Napster co-founder Sean Parker and his Faerie bride Alexandra, who each gave Clinton $2,700 (the legal limit) back in December.
• Clinton's average amount received in the Bay Area is $1,369 as "people are on average utilizing over 50% of the $2,700 maximum that they’s allowed to give to a candidate," Leese says.
• Bernie Sanders has the lowest average at $325 per donor, "but his 4,069 donors are more than all the remaining candidates combined."
• Only John Kasich is collecting more per individual than Clinton is, "clocking in at $1,545 on average, but from only 66 donors that really want him to win."
• Sean and Alexandra also each got refunds of $2,600 from the now-defunct Rubio campaign in June of last year, Leese notes.
• "Mark Zuckerberg also showed up in the data as having received a refund from the Rubio campaign," Leese says, "but we didn't see a donation to anyone else. I guess they all knew a futile cause when they saw one."

Here's how Leese came up with the map: Based on the data from the FEC's February 20, 2016 disclosure report detailing individual contributions to candidates, he looked at the information for the zip codes that make up Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma Counties.

"To make this data more usable, we cleaned it up a bit first, grouping together line items from people with the same name, from the same zip code and with the same occupation, effectively removing duplicated entries for the same person," Leese says.

"It is important to note that individuals giving less than $200 during the election cycle are not required to disclose their personal information, but some will do it voluntarily. Although this stipulation affects the data for each candidate differently, it is not intrinsically biased and we feel the data is still statistically relevant for comparing them to one another."

Since candidates like Jeb Bush and Ben Carson collected money but dropped out, they ended up grouped together with the rest of the former candidates. Given how recently Rubio was in the race, Leese left his information in "to show where he stood, and emphasize the gap that currently exists in GOP support."

Previously: According To Facebook Likes, Californians Love Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump (And Ben Carson)
SF Ranks 2nd In Highest Per Capita Campaign Contributions To Bernie Sanders