How Have PhDs voted in Past Elections?

[H. Ross Peron]

While college educated voters were a generally Republican demographic well into the 1990s, what about specifically voters with doctorates? Postgraduate voters seem to have been consistently more liberal than those with college degree alone but how far does this go back? Most post-1964 Dems did well with them but what about earlier? It seems like much of the intelligentsia supported FDR's New Deal though I assume that college professors were a Republican demographic up to 1928 (if only bc they were disproportionately WASP at the time).

[Sumner 1868]

No idea about the presidential level, but exit polling in congressional races show they were already skewering Democratic in 1984.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/07/weekinreview/20101107-detailed-exitpolls.html

[DabbingSanta]

Postgraduate exit poll results by Edison Research / NEP

2016: 58-37 Clinton
2012: 55-42 Obama
2008: 58-40 Obama
2004: 55-44 Kerry

[Orser67]

My first guess is that they've leaned Democratic since the 1930s, with perhaps some exceptions in landslide Republican elections, but maybe I'm overrating the split between PhDs and the college-educated professional class (which definitely supported Republicans until fairly recently). Even today, PhD holders are fairly rare in terms of percentage of voters, so I'm not sure how much hard data there is.

[RINO Tom]

I'm conflicted on this one.

On one hand, people often make the mistake of thinking of "college graduates" (or, in this case, "PhD holders") as a similar group across time.  A college graduate in the 1950s was more analogous to "upper-middle class, White man" than a "college graduate" today, and it is therefore less of a surprise that the group was solidly Republican.  On a similar note, I once saw that Romney and Obama practically tied among WHITE postgraduates, leading me to believe that this group in the past was indeed fairly Republican.

On the other hand, I think people very much underrate the "intellectualism" strain that has always been present in the Democratic Party all the way back to Jefferson to Wilson to today.  Just because the GOP was winning the upper classes doesn't mean there wasn't a subset of that group that has always been present in the Democratic coalition, and PhD holders would be the exact type I would imagine.  A relevant quote by author H.P. Lovecraft on the Republican Party, made well before the "New Deal Era" had really taken shape:

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

It doesn't sound all that different from how your more "intellectually minded" Democrats talk about the GOP today.  I think there has always been at least a subset of Democrats who saw the GOP as the "selfish and stupid party," lol.

In order to make a more informed guess, I think I would need to know how many Americans had "PhDs" at each point in our history, but I would imagine that by the 1930s, many PhD holders were voting Democratic, and before that it was still a split group, POSSIBLY leaning Republican simply due to the fact that in order to have a PhD, you had to most likely be wealthy, White and WASPy (but with some of the more vocal "intellectualists" perhaps being more liberal).

[Del Tachi]

The PhD electorate are "postgraduates" after you cut out all the MDs, JDs, MBAs and other non-academic degrees.  There's also going to be a heavy bias towards folks working in academia/research among PhDs that is less pronounced in the larger "postgraduate" demographic. 

Men still outnumber women in PhD graduates.  In the STEM fields there's also going to be a heavy bias toward Asian immigrants.  All in all, I'd say that PhDs were probably Republican leaning up until the 1960s but have since become a reliably Democratic group.  The admission of MDs/JDs/MBAs would move this group considerably to the right, however. 

[RINO Tom]

^ It'd be REALLY interesting to see a political study done on postgraduates, dividing out by degree type, sex, race, age, income, etc.  A big divide would also be Ivy League/top school vs. the rest, with the former being more Democratic.  I know red avatars like to say that is entirely because they're elite schools and the GOP is anti-intellectual (neither are UNtrue in a sense), but it's also that the fundamental atmosphere at those elite schools is so much more *academia-centric* in nature, and you get less of the "hard science Republicanism" that you might get at, say, other MBA schools.  I don't go to an elite MBA school (DePaul's Kellstadt), but it IS in the third biggest city in the country, and I would still say the majority of my MBA professors and classmates have leaned right, when adjusting for demographics ... for example, yeah, my one gay professor was pretty liberal, and the women in my cohort certainly skew further left than the White men, etc.

[darklordoftech]

I’m sure Al Smith was seen as a “liberal elite” candidate in 1924 and 1928 and Herbert Hoover was seen as a “rural rube”. In the 1950s you had McCarthyist Republicans and Adlai Stevenson Democrats.

[Agonized-Statism]

A good statistic to look at would be the fields in which people get PhDs. I would suspect them to vote more conservatively going back in time, when there was a stronger partisan divide by class and there were more PhDs in hard science at a time when things like racial science and Social Darwinism were widely accepted. Your average American intellectual in the 19th and early 20th centuries was extremely Eurocentric, to the point of overt racism, and even fashioned himself a European aristocrat. It shows in things like some wealthy Americans' stupid oratorical style at the time, which is where we got things like the now dead Transatlantic accent. With progressivism becoming the norm, academia has taken a more deconstructionist approach to tradition (especially in the soft sciences) and there's way more financially struggling PhDs who would appreciate some social programs. There's always exceptions, of course- I know an IO psychologist who's voted Republican all their life.

[H. Ross Peron]

I'm conflicted on this one.

On one hand, people often make the mistake of thinking of "college graduates" (or, in this case, "PhD holders") as a similar group across time.  A college graduate in the 1950s was more analogous to "upper-middle class, White man" than a "college graduate" today, and it is therefore less of a surprise that the group was solidly Republican.  On a similar note, I once saw that Romney and Obama practically tied among WHITE postgraduates, leading me to believe that this group in the past was indeed fairly Republican.

On the other hand, I think people very much underrate the "intellectualism" strain that has always been present in the Democratic Party all the way back to Jefferson to Wilson to today.  Just because the GOP was winning the upper classes doesn't mean there wasn't a subset of that group that has always been present in the Democratic coalition, and PhD holders would be the exact type I would imagine.  A relevant quote by author H.P. Lovecraft on the Republican Party, made well before the "New Deal Era" had really taken shape:

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

It doesn't sound all that different from how your more "intellectually minded" Democrats talk about the GOP today.  I think there has always been at least a subset of Democrats who saw the GOP as the "selfish and stupid party," lol.

In order to make a more informed guess, I think I would need to know how many Americans had "PhDs" at each point in our history, but I would imagine that by the 1930s, many PhD holders were voting Democratic, and before that it was still a split group, POSSIBLY leaning Republican simply due to the fact that in order to have a PhD, you had to most likely be wealthy, White and WASPy (but with some of the more vocal "intellectualists" perhaps being more liberal).

This is a great point. Lovecraft is an interesting case, however, because his shift to the political left occurred fairly late in his life mostly as a consequence of the Depression and the failure of orthodox economic policy to alleviate it. Before that, his fairly elite WASP background as well as Social Darwinist and Anglophilic inclinations led him to support the Republican Party (but also sympathize with the Confederacy!) and espouse nativist and aristocratic views in politics. I think at least one observer argued that FDR's similarly elite Yankee background helped ease Lovecraft's own political transition. It seems to me that while intellectuals before the New Deal often did have progressive views, it was often of an elite, anti-democratic kind and generally associated with the Republican Party rather than the Democrats. For example, there certainly wasn't much intellectual sympathy for William Jennings Bryan.

[Orser67]

Not 100% what OP is asking, but here are some relevant studies summarized in a Wikipedia article:

In 1955, Robert Maynard Hutchins led an effort within the Ford Foundation to document and analyze the effects of McCarthyism on academic freedom...They also included a few questions about political party affiliations and recent voting patterns, and reported that there were more Democrats than Republicans, 47% to 16%. According to sociologist Neil Gross, the study was significant because it was the first effort to poll university faculty specifically about their political views.

A second study, conducted in 1969 on behalf of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, was the first to be performed with a large survey sample, extensive questions about political views, and what Neil Gross characterized as highly rigorous analytic methods...[The study] found that about 46% of professors described themselves as liberal, 27% described themselves as moderates, and 28% described themselves as conservative...

Smaller follow-up surveys on behalf of the Carnegie Foundation held in 1975, 1984, 1989, and 1997 showed an increased trend among professors toward the left, apart from a small movement to the right in 1984. By the 1997 study, 57% of the professors surveyed identified as liberals, 20% as moderates, and 24% as conservatives.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I'm conflicted on this one.

On one hand, people often make the mistake of thinking of "college graduates" (or, in this case, "PhD holders") as a similar group across time.  A college graduate in the 1950s was more analogous to "upper-middle class, White man" than a "college graduate" today, and it is therefore less of a surprise that the group was solidly Republican.  On a similar note, I once saw that Romney and Obama practically tied among WHITE postgraduates, leading me to believe that this group in the past was indeed fairly Republican.

On the other hand, I think people very much underrate the "intellectualism" strain that has always been present in the Democratic Party all the way back to Jefferson to Wilson to today.  Just because the GOP was winning the upper classes doesn't mean there wasn't a subset of that group that has always been present in the Democratic coalition, and PhD holders would be the exact type I would imagine.  A relevant quote by author H.P. Lovecraft on the Republican Party, made well before the "New Deal Era" had really taken shape:

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

It doesn't sound all that different from how your more "intellectually minded" Democrats talk about the GOP today.  I think there has always been at least a subset of Democrats who saw the GOP as the "selfish and stupid party," lol.

In order to make a more informed guess, I think I would need to know how many Americans had "PhDs" at each point in our history, but I would imagine that by the 1930s, many PhD holders were voting Democratic, and before that it was still a split group, POSSIBLY leaning Republican simply due to the fact that in order to have a PhD, you had to most likely be wealthy, White and WASPy (but with some of the more vocal "intellectualists" perhaps being more liberal).

I've had the same thought before, makes me think of a scene in a movie about the Lincoln-Douglas debate where Douglas is sort of razzing Lincoln for his backwoods sensibility and lack of refinement. Also reminds me of Theodore White's characterization of the GOP in 1960: "From 1912 down almost to date, then, the machinery of the Republican Party has remained in the hands of the regulars, the descendants of Thurlow Weed and Mark Hanna, These are men who, with unflagging loyalty and granite resolution against the future, hold the Party together, do its grubby daily duties, raise its funds, maintain its discipline and, through the long lean season of politics, perform its essential tasks.  They are by and large very dreary men, difficult to speak to, suspicious of the press and book learning, convinced that the world betrays them."

[Indy Texas]

My first guess is that they've leaned Democratic since the 1930s, with perhaps some exceptions in landslide Republican elections, but maybe I'm overrating the split between PhDs and the college-educated professional class (which definitely supported Republicans until fairly recently). Even today, PhD holders are fairly rare in terms of percentage of voters, so I'm not sure how much hard data there is.

I don't think you are.

Getting a PhD and being an academic attracts a very different set of people than someone who's getting an MBA and going to work for a company.

[Indy Texas]

^ It'd be REALLY interesting to see a political study done on postgraduates, dividing out by degree type, sex, race, age, income, etc.  A big divide would also be Ivy League/top school vs. the rest, with the former being more Democratic.  I know red avatars like to say that is entirely because they're elite schools and the GOP is anti-intellectual (neither are UNtrue in a sense), but it's also that the fundamental atmosphere at those elite schools is so much more *academia-centric* in nature, and you get less of the "hard science Republicanism" that you might get at, say, other MBA schools.  I don't go to an elite MBA school (DePaul's Kellstadt), but it IS in the third biggest city in the country, and I would still say the majority of my MBA professors and classmates have leaned right, when adjusting for demographics ... for example, yeah, my one gay professor was pretty liberal, and the women in my cohort certainly skew further left than the White men, etc.

This is because for most people, an MBA is something you get a few years into your career in order to move up to a management role or transition to a different industry/functional area.

The top-tier programs like HBS/YSM/etc have those people but they also attract a lot of people who are going there directly from undergrad because they are academic high achievers who don't know what they want to do and an MBA is just another meritocratic credential for them to collect. Those are the kind of people who often end up working for McKinsey/Bain/BCG or as White House Fellows or doing the management trainee track at someplace like Procter & Gamble or Coca-Cola.

[Tintrlvr]

The PhD electorate are "postgraduates" after you cut out all the MDs, JDs, MBAs and other non-academic degrees.  There's also going to be a heavy bias towards folks working in academia/research among PhDs that is less pronounced in the larger "postgraduate" demographic.  

Men still outnumber women in PhD graduates.  In the STEM fields there's also going to be a heavy bias toward Asian immigrants.  All in all, I'd say that PhDs were probably Republican leaning up until the 1960s but have since become a reliably Democratic group.  The admission of MDs/JDs/MBAs would move this group considerably to the right, however.  

Probably not on the bolded. There are far more JDs (about 1.3 million) than MDs (about 600,000) and I believe than MBAs (but couldn't find data on number of holders), and JDs are a very strongly Democratic group (as I recall, polling by the ABA in 2016 suggested JD holders were voting more than 80% for Clinton - can't find the source right now). I do agree that MDs are about evenly split, and MBAs should be fairly Republican.

Donation information is easier to find; lawyers and law firms donated $34.6 million to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just $942,000 to Trump (plus a bunch more to other Republican primary candidates, but still way less than the Clinton total in aggregate).

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/how-much-money-did-lawyers-contribute-to-the-presidential-election/

This all aligns with my anecdotal experience of working as a lawyer, too, which is that Republican lawyers, even at the highest income levels ($1m+ annually), are a relatively small minority.

[Indy Texas]

The PhD electorate are "postgraduates" after you cut out all the MDs, JDs, MBAs and other non-academic degrees.  There's also going to be a heavy bias towards folks working in academia/research among PhDs that is less pronounced in the larger "postgraduate" demographic.  

Men still outnumber women in PhD graduates.  In the STEM fields there's also going to be a heavy bias toward Asian immigrants.  All in all, I'd say that PhDs were probably Republican leaning up until the 1960s but have since become a reliably Democratic group.  The admission of MDs/JDs/MBAs would move this group considerably to the right, however.  

Probably not on the bolded. There are far more than JDs (about 1.3 million) than MDs (about 600,000) and I believe than MBAs (but couldn't find data on number of holders), and JDs are a very strongly Democratic group (as I recall, polling by the ABA in 2016 suggested JD holders were voting more than 80% for Clinton - can't find the source right now). I do agree that MDs are about evenly split, and MBAs should be fairly Republican.

Donation information is easier to find; lawyers and law firms donated $34.6 million to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just $942,000 to Trump (plus a bunch more to other Republican primary candidates, but still way less than the Clinton total).

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/how-much-money-did-lawyers-contribute-to-the-presidential-election/

Also, MDs have moved to the left over the years as the field has gotten more female and more nonwhite (especially South/East Asian), and changes in healthcare have made the typical physician a salaried W-2 employee of a major hospital/healthcare company rather than a self-employed business owner of his own practice. Very different incentives.

[Del Tachi]

The PhD electorate are "postgraduates" after you cut out all the MDs, JDs, MBAs and other non-academic degrees.  There's also going to be a heavy bias towards folks working in academia/research among PhDs that is less pronounced in the larger "postgraduate" demographic. 

Men still outnumber women in PhD graduates.  In the STEM fields there's also going to be a heavy bias toward Asian immigrants.  All in all, I'd say that PhDs were probably Republican leaning up until the 1960s but have since become a reliably Democratic group.  The admission of MDs/JDs/MBAs would move this group considerably to the right, however. 

Probably not on the bolded. There are far more JDs (about 1.3 million) than MDs (about 600,000) and I believe than MBAs (but couldn't find data on number of holders), and JDs are a very strongly Democratic group (as I recall, polling by the ABA in 2016 suggested JD holders were voting more than 80% for Clinton - can't find the source right now). I do agree that MDs are about evenly split, and MBAs should be fairly Republican.

Donation information is easier to find; lawyers and law firms donated $34.6 million to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just $942,000 to Trump (plus a bunch more to other Republican primary candidates, but still way less than the Clinton total in aggregate).

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/how-much-money-did-lawyers-contribute-to-the-presidential-election/

This all aligns with my anecdotal experience of working as a lawyer, too, which is that Republican lawyers, even at the highest income levels ($1m+ annually), are a relatively small minority.

I  guess it depends on whether or not PhDs are more or less than 80% Democratic.  I'd wager they're >80%, so the addition of JDs/MDs/MBAs would make the total "postgraduate" demographic more Republican than it would be otherwise.  The ABA number is interesting, but sounds pretty lopsided to me (so I'd love to see the original source and methodology.)  The donations point towards Democrats being heavily, heavily favored among attorneys, but I imagine the law firms/attorneys organized to make political contributions skew towards big time trial lawyers and not the more numerous "local" law firms.   

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I'm conflicted on this one.

On one hand, people often make the mistake of thinking of "college graduates" (or, in this case, "PhD holders") as a similar group across time.  A college graduate in the 1950s was more analogous to "upper-middle class, White man" than a "college graduate" today, and it is therefore less of a surprise that the group was solidly Republican.  On a similar note, I once saw that Romney and Obama practically tied among WHITE postgraduates, leading me to believe that this group in the past was indeed fairly Republican.

On the other hand, I think people very much underrate the "intellectualism" strain that has always been present in the Democratic Party all the way back to Jefferson to Wilson to today.  Just because the GOP was winning the upper classes doesn't mean there wasn't a subset of that group that has always been present in the Democratic coalition, and PhD holders would be the exact type I would imagine.  A relevant quote by author H.P. Lovecraft on the Republican Party, made well before the "New Deal Era" had really taken shape:

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

It doesn't sound all that different from how your more "intellectually minded" Democrats talk about the GOP today.  I think there has always been at least a subset of Democrats who saw the GOP as the "selfish and stupid party," lol.

In order to make a more informed guess, I think I would need to know how many Americans had "PhDs" at each point in our history, but I would imagine that by the 1930s, many PhD holders were voting Democratic, and before that it was still a split group, POSSIBLY leaning Republican simply due to the fact that in order to have a PhD, you had to most likely be wealthy, White and WASPy (but with some of the more vocal "intellectualists" perhaps being more liberal).

This is a great point. Lovecraft is an interesting case, however, because his shift to the political left occurred fairly late in his life mostly as a consequence of the Depression and the failure of orthodox economic policy to alleviate it. Before that, his fairly elite WASP background as well as Social Darwinist and Anglophilic inclinations led him to support the Republican Party (but also sympathize with the Confederacy!) and espouse nativist and aristocratic views in politics. I think at least one observer argued that FDR's similarly elite Yankee background helped ease Lovecraft's own political transition. It seems to me that while intellectuals before the New Deal often did have progressive views, it was often of an elite, anti-democratic kind and generally associated with the Republican Party rather than the Democrats. For example, there certainly wasn't much intellectual sympathy for William Jennings Bryan.

I think there was always a significant segment of those types who tended to favor Democrats as well. The New York Times has always been a Democratic leaning paper and reading old presidential endorsements of there's of candidates like Parker, Cox and Davis the sentiments echoed seem very familiar to me.

The reason I bumped this thread is because I was recently thinking about the movie Copperhead as well as the book it's based on which you can read on archive.org. It's set in a small town in upstate New York during the civil war and the main character is one of the only Democrats who is also portrayed sympathetically as one of the few freethinkers and educated men surrounded by uneducated bible thumping rubes who have fallen under the sway of the local abolitionist. If right-wing pseudohistorians like Dinesh D'Souza wanted to make a stronger case that "actually the parties haven't switched" they could do no better then this book.