Ivy League Democrats and State School Republicans

Daniel Kreiss: “Using staffers’ educational backgrounds, we network analyzed the diversity of connections among presidential campaigns and the universities where staffers graduated. We found that Democratic presidential campaigns have continuously hired staffers from a homogeneous group of universities. Since 2004, Democratic presidential campaigns have hired 25% of the staffers in our dataset from 15 universities including Harvard, NYU, Stanford, Georgetown, UC Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, University of Chicago, Boston University, and DePaul, just to name the top ten.”

“A very different picture emerges on the other side of the aisle. The top three Republican schools are state public institutions: University of Texas, Austin (3%), Ohio State University (2%), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1%). The rest of the schools in the Republican top twenty are a mix of public and private institutions, including state schools such as George Mason (2%), the University of Alabama (2%), and Missouri State University (1%) and Brigham Young (2%).”