Divided By What We Do

We hear a lot about how divided we are politically in the United States.

We hear a lot about a political divide between those who live in urban areas versus rural areas.

We hear about a political divide between genders, or race, or ethnicity.

We even hear about a political divide between those who are married versus those who are single.

However, I came across some data recently that indicates one of the biggest divides is simply based on what people do for a living.

Political scientist Adam Bonica undertook research that looked at 2008 federal election campaign contributions from individuals and sorted the ideological distribution of that money by occupation group.

Bonica has since updated the data for more years but it appears that his initial work is still illustrative of the ideological divide.

For example, here are the graphs for motion pictures, books, publishing and newspapers, professors and online computer services. This depicts contributions to far left, middle of the road or far right candidates.

Are there any conservatives in Hollywood?

If any one tells you there is not a left wing bias in journalism and publishing do not believe them.

If you ever wondered why so many young people come out of college with liberal leanings this is pretty clear evidence of where it comes from.

You might have seen the recent report that 90% of the political contributions made by Google (Alphabet) employees between 2004-2018 had gone to Democrats. The same is undoubtedly true for Facebook, Twitter and many others in the online computer services category.  Are we supposed to believe that they are not skewing search results or shadow banning users?

What are the conservative occupations?

However, note that the left-leaning occupations are far more liberal than the right-leaning occupations are conservative.

You can see all of the major occupation groups here.

Jonathan Kay summarized all of these charts rather succinctly on Twitter from his perspective.

As you might expect, Cynthia had a different perspective.

No matter how you look at it or how you explain it, these charts demonstrate that we are divided as much by what we do as any other factor when it comes to our politics.