Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Faculty Presidential Election Survey: 78% Harris, 8% Trump
Inside Higher Ed, Faculty Overwhelmingly Back Harris in November. But They Won’t Tell Students to Do the Same.:
Of the more than 1,100 faculty members across the U.S. who responded to a new Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey, almost none said they’re sitting this presidential election out. Ninety-six percent said they plan to vote. And they overwhelmingly intend to vote for Democrats.
Seventy-eight percent support Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz, while only 8 percent of the respondents back Donald Trump and JD Vance, according to the survey, which has a 2.9 percent margin of error. But while their personal support for Democrats was overwhelming, almost no respondents said they plan to tell students which party or candidate to vote for.
The new findings broadly echo past research showing that faculty lean left. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were Democrats, and the next biggest category wasn’t Republicans but rather Independents, at 22 percent. Republicans clocked in at 7 percent, not far ahead of the “other” and “prefer not to respond” categories, each at 5 percent.
In 2020, the conservative National Association of Scholars published a study of tenured and tenure-track professors at top-ranked institutions in their states, finding that about 48 percent were registered Democrats and 6 percent were Republicans. The new Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research poll was sent to a broader range of faculty members—including non-tenure-track professors—at a wider variety of institutions.
Jonathan Turley (George Washington), Kamala Harris Is Slipping in the Polls, But Not With University Professors:
The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be the single most divisive election in our history. The public is split right down the middle, with almost every group splintering between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
There is, however, one group that seems to be approaching virtual unanimity: professors. A new survey of more than 1,000 professors shows that 78 percent will vote for Harris, and only 8 percent will vote for Trump. ...
A Georgetown study recently found that only 9 percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll [Eric Martínez (MIT) & Kevin Tobia (Georgetown), What Do Law Professors Believe about Law and the Legal Academy? An Empirical Inquiry, 112 Geo. L.J. 111 (2023)].
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