Study: Minnesota educators lean decidedly left

An analysis examining the partisan split for professors and K-12 teachers nationwide and in each state has found that educators overwhelmingly support Democrats, even in Republican states.

Author Jay Greene with the Educational Freedom Institute (EFI) investigated 437,783 campaign contributions made by K-12 teachers and university professors during the 2022 election cycle. The results: There is an obvious leftward bias of educators across the country.

…[U]niversity professors lean much more to the left than do K-12 teachers, and this monolithic support for Democratic political candidates among professors hardly varies with the partisan composition of the state in which they are located. While decidedly liberal, K-12 teachers are less so than professors, and the extent of their leftward tilt tends to vary with the partisan make-up of each state.

In states in which Republicans hold the majority of the state legislature, “19 had a majority of K-12 teacher campaign contributions backing Democrats during the 2022 election cycle. In 13 of those Republican states, more than 60% of campaign contributions from teachers went to Democrats,” according to Greene’s analysis. (See Table 3.)

Greene notes that the fact educators tend to be more liberal than the general public “should come as no surprise,” but “it is less well-known just how liberal they are, how much professors differ from K-12 teachers, and how much the ideological inclinations of educators vary across states.”

Why do professors lack almost zero partisan variation? Greene proposes one explanation:

Professors…compete in a national market for employment and are very often employed far from where they grew up. More than a fifth of professors were born in another country, so it may be more accurate to say that the professor job-market is global rather than national. To the extent that partisanship is shaped by where one grows up, teachers are more likely to reflect the political preferences of the communities in which they work than are professors.

The national lock that left-leaning professors hold over who is hired as new professors, who is able to publish in top journals, and who receives tenure, helps solidify the extremely high and unvaried rate of support for the Democratic party among faculty.

Data Orbital, a data/research firm that EFI contracted with for the analysis, gathered campaign contribution information from Federal Election Commission reports. Because people who make campaign contributions are supposed to list their occupation on the federal form, Data Orbital was able to take the contributions from those who self-reported as educators and classify them as K-12 teachers or university professors. The classification includes professors and K-12 teachers working in both public and private institutions, as the information collected “does not easily facilitate distinguishing which of the 437,783 contributions came from those employed by public versus private schools,” explains Greene.

Data Orbital also classified the recipients of the educators’ contributions as Democrats, Republicans, or other, of which Greene focused on contributions to either Republican or Democratic candidates or committees for the purposes of his study.

“Given that many private colleges and schools are religious, it is likely that our results understate how heavily educators favor Democrats if we were to focus only on public institutions,” continues Greene.

Minnesota

In Minnesota, Data Orbital identified 1,542 campaign contributions from K-12 teachers — 87 percent (1,341) went to Democrats and 13 percent (201) went to Republicans. Nationally, 68 percent of K-12 teacher contributions went to Democrats, 32 percent to Republicans.

Among Minnesota professors, 97 percent (2,977 out of 3,056 campaign contributions) went to Democrats and 3 percent (79) went to Republicans. Nationally, 93 percent of professor contributions went to Democrats and 7 percent to Republicans.

Here are the contributions from educators in Minnesota’s neighboring states, all of which have Republican majorities.

• North Dakota (87 percent Republican): 74 percent of campaign contributions from K-12 teachers went to Republicans, 26 percent to Democrats; 99 percent of campaign contributions from professors went to Democrats, 1 percent to Republicans
  
• South Dakota (90 percent Republican): 54 percent of campaign contributions from K-12 teachers went to Republicans, 46 percent to Democrats; 90 percent of campaign contributions from professors went to Democrats, 10 percent to Republicans
  
• Iowa (64 percent Republican): 32 percent of campaign contributions from K-12 teachers went to Republicans, 68 percent to Democrats; 95 percent of campaign contributions from professors went to Democrats, 5 percent to Republicans
  
• Wisconsin (65 percent Republican): 13 percent of campaign contributions from K-12 teachers went to Republicans, 87 percent to Democrats; 98 percent of campaign contributions from professors went to Democrats; 2 percent to Republicans

Concludes Greene:

The findings confirm the lack of partisan diversity among educators, especially in universities. If a quality education involves exposure to a diversity of perspectives, the status quo is incredibly deficient in this regard. In addition, if education should reflect the value preferences of the states and communities being served, there is no indication that conservatives have their views better represented in educational settings that their children attend and that Republican policymakers fund.

Campaign Contributions by Type of Educator and State, 2022