Vast majority of faculty and staff members from universities support Hillary Clinton

By Tania Diaz Bazan. She works at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago. Excerpts:

"As Election Day looms, our calculations indicate that faculty and staff at the top 100 colleges in the United States lend their support almost entirely to Hillary Clinton.

Looking at political contributions to presidential candidates, we examined which candidates faculty and staff donate to. Interesting results appear when we focus on the 2016 presidential campaign. Looking at the top ten universities (as ranked by U.S. News & World Report), on average 99 percent of the total amount donated by faculty and staff at each university went to Hillary Clinton (see Figure 1). Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia University placed not only at the top as the best colleges in the US but also as the biggest supporters of Hillary Clinton. For example, Harvard’s faculty and staff have raised a total of $443,453 for presidential candidates in this election cycle, with the vast majority ($440,907) raised for Clinton. Yale University, Clinton’s alma mater, has raised a total of $226,411, ranking fifth in terms of donations among the top ten colleges."

"There is not much difference in support across the top eleven to 100 universities. As shown in Figure 3, on average, faculty and staff support Clinton by 97.5 percent (gray bar). The biggest donations received by Trump came from Wake Forest (19.1 percent) and Methodist University (12.4 percent) both located in North Carolina (see light blue bars). Members of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Clemson University donated 13.4 percent and 11.4 percent of their total amount raised to Gary Johnson. By contrast, employees of Brown University, University of Californa Los Angeles (UCLA), New York University (NYU), and University of California Berkeley, among others, gave 100 percent of total funds raised for Clinton."

"The disparity between donations to Republicans and Democrats by university faculty and staff is most evident for the 2016 presidential election. In 2012, Barack Obama captured on average 91 percent of total donations raised by members of each university, as shown by Figure 4. Hillary Clinton increased Obama’s numbers by 6.5 percentage points (compare with Figure 1) in 2016."