According to a new study by conservative campus watchdog The College Fix, 95% of donations made by professors at North Carolina’s 10 largest universities, both public and private, went to Democrats.
The study used publicly available information from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and found $689,439.57 was donated to Democrats and Democrat-leaning committees and organizations. In comparison, Republicans received a mere $33,773.49. Donations for third parties and groups without clear ideological leanings received $2,199.
The candidate who received far-and-away the most from these N.C. professors was Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley, with about 20% of all donations, or around $140,000. Budd, on the other hand, only received $500 total. Even out-of-state Democrat candidates like Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and Arizona U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly received much more.
At UNC System schools, Beasley raised $15,660, while Budd did not raise a penny from professors. Western Carolina University had the most partisan balance of schools in the study, with 15% of contributions going to Republicans.
This overwhelming one-sided support has been fairly consistent in finding from other similar surveys. In 2020, The Fix reported that 97% of North Carolina professors’ contributions went to Democrats, and this year, they found that 96% of Ivy League professors’ contributions went to Democrats.
According to The Fix, they “reached out to all 10 universities in the past week to ask if there seems to be bias among professors based on the Democratic political donations and if there is any reason for the large difference in donations between Republicans and Democrats, but received no response.”