Apr 14, 2019 - Politics & Policy

20% of all hires by Democratic campaigns are from just 7 schools

Marisa Fernandez

Harvard campus — Harvard Business School. Photo: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images

Staffers from past Democratic presidential campaigns are more likely to have gone to an Ivy League college than staffers from Republican campaigns, a new study from North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows.

Why it matters: The student bodies of Ivy League schools are less representative of the U.S. overall, and campaigns with less diversity run the risk of failing to reach voters from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The study warns that if Democrats want President Trump out of office, they should "reach far beyond the hallowed halls of the Ivy League and other elite education institutions to help them craft their appeals to voters."

By the numbers: The School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill collected profiles from 954 presidential primary and general election campaign staffers from the 2004–2016 cycles.

20% of all hires by Democratic campaigns are from just 7 schools: Harvard (5%), Stanford (3%), New York University (3%), University of California Berkeley (3%), Georgetown (2%), Columbia (2%) and Yale (2%).
The top 3 Republican schools are public: University of Texas, Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The bottom line, according to the study: "Our public and non-elite private institutions, many far away from the country’s major cities and corridors of power, often have diverse student bodies in terms of geography, class, race and ethnicity, and life experiences. They are often more representative of America than elite, Ivy League institutions."

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20% of all hires by Democratic campaigns are from just 7 schools

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