While Republicans stemmed some of the bleeding with cash infusions from blue-collar workers, with truck drivers and construction workers being notable examples, studies have long shown that those with college degrees are far more likely to donate to political campaigns, which makes courting educated voters crucial for either party during tight elections.

For its analysis, the Washington Examiner relied on the Federal Election Commission’s bulk data for the 2024 election cycle. The FEC data display every individual political donation made during that period. The Washington Examiner filtered the dataset to include contributions made to the campaigns of President Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris, their associated joint fundraising committees, as well as the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee.

Purely national committees were chosen to best isolate national trends. Many professionals, particularly those in leadership roles, donate to members of their congressional delegation regardless of whether their personal politics align. A liberal working in Texas’s petroleum industry as an executive, for instance, might cut a check to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to buy influence for his firm while supporting a Democrat for the White House.

Occupational giving statistics more or less tracked with the postelection analysis of pundits. Those occupying prestigious roles in healthcare, corporate America, and academia primarily favored Democrats, whereas blue-collar professions, many of them unionized, tilted Republican.

Donors who listed their occupation as “doctor,” “physician,” “surgeon,” or some similar role, for instance, gave close to $30 million to the Democratic committees compared to just about $15 million to their GOP counterparts during the 2024 cycle. This represents an almost perfect reversal from 1990, when 61% of national political donations made by doctors went to Republicans, and just 38% were directed to Democrats.

Other professions with traditionally conservative reputations, such as lawyers and those in the real estate industry, also gave overwhelmingly to Harris and her aligned committees. Of the $127.6 million in contributions made by donors with occupations including the words “lawyer” or “attorney” during the 2024 election cycle, roughly 80% went to the Democratic committees.

This represents a significant shift from 2012, when just over 60% of donations from lawyers went to Democrats, according to Business Insider.

The real estate industry tells a similar, if less pronounced, story. In 2012, roughly 35% of the hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from those in the profession went to Democrats. That share grew to nearly 50% during the 2024 election cycle.

While college-educated people on the whole have been running away from the Republican Party for some time now, there’s a more complicated story involving doctors. As the number of doctors supporting Republicans has cratered, so has the proportion of physicians who operate their own practices. Fewer doctors concerned with policies impacting small business owners could very well translate to fewer donations for Republicans.

“Your average Republican, including certainly President Trump himself, at least wants to present
himself as business-friendly,” Capital Research Center research director Michael Watson told the Washington Examiner. “If you think about the sort of regulations and deregulations that,
you know, the EPA, the Interior Department, and even Labor are moving, they are pretty
conventional Republican deregulations for the most part. You get populist things like President
Trump’s tariff policy that make business ownership squeamish, but compare that to what you
would have gotten from the Harris administration, which would have been, you know, totally
intertwined with organized labor, totally intertwined with environmentalist groups, totally
intertwined with big philanthropy and its goals of gutting and destroying the market enterprise
system. You can see why the more entrepreneurial white-collar professionals would still prefer the
Right.”

Indeed, the GOP’s business-friendly reputation could still be paying dividends as dentists remain strong contributors to Republicans, with the Washington Examiner’s analysis finding that donors who identified themselves as dentists — a profession where owning a private practice remains the norm.

The medical profession has also become more female and less white, demographic shifts that favor the Democratic Party and are ongoing across the white-collar world. Anecdotally, some doctors point to the GOP’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as something that alienated them from the party. The party’s flirtation with economic populism could serve to push away some of the remaining conservative doctors operating private practices.

While the Republican Party’s pro-business reputation may serve it well with small business owners, its relationship with the C-suite is more complicated.

Donors who listed their occupation as some form of business executive gave roughly $120 million to Harris and her allied committees against just over $16 million to Trump and his aligned committees, according to the Washington Examiner’s analysis.

It is important to note that not every executive is Mark Zuckerberg. The vast majority are nowhere close to household names and, while they serve as a valuable barometer for the culture of corporate America, they lack the wealth necessary to individually shake up races as some billionaires have the power to do.

Putting rank-and-file executives aside, the wealthiest spenders in the corporate world still owe their allegiance to the GOP.

Of the 10 largest donors during the 2024 cycle, eight of them gave primarily to Republicans. Among these were SpaceX’s Elon Musk, handing nearly $300 million to GOP causes, Citadel’s Kenneth Griffin, who doled out $108.4 million, and Paul Singer of Elliott Management fame, who spent $66.8 million assisting Republicans. On the Democratic side, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent $64.3 million, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz disbursed $50.6 million.

These big spenders opted to make the bulk of their contributions to super PACs, rather than the candidates themselves, as doing so allows them to skirt contribution limits and possibly exercise greater control over how their money is spent.

While executives themselves may lean left, the institutions they lead often aim to play nice with both parties, with substantial variation between industries.

Politico reported shortly after the election that industry donors, including corporate PACs and super PACs, made 64% of their contributions to Republicans. That figure, however, was skewed substantially by Musk’s late-game spending blitz and, without him, the numbers look closer to 50-50. Some industries, such as healthcare and law, gave more to Democrats, whereas others, such as agribusiness and energy, favored the GOP.

Musk’s entrance into the right-wing political game, alongside other Silicon Valley heavyweights such as the Winklevoss twins and David Sacks, generated ample press coverage about a conservative tech realignment. Indeed, many technology executives broke with industry norms and openly backed Trump in 2024. Concurrently, a sizable right-of-center and tech-adjacent online community began to flourish on the social media platform X.

Be that as it may, Big Tech employees still overwhelmingly supported Democrats in their political contributions during the last presidential election.

The Washington Examiner’s analysis found that people working for Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, the six largest publicly traded corporations in America, favored Harris and her allied committees over Trump and his committees by a factor of almost 3 to 1 — with the former receiving $15.3 million from the employees and the latter taking in roughly $5.8 million.

Microsoft employees had the most pronounced gap, with 81% of its donations going to the Democratic committees, whereas Amazon’s were the closest, with only 64% of donations directed toward the Left. Amazon’s numbers, however, could be skewed by the corporation’s employment of large numbers of blue-collar warehouse and transportation workers.

There were, however, some bright spots in the data for Republicans.

Though donations from Big Tech employees remained overwhelmingly liberal, they did trend rightward in 2024, per an analysis conducted by the Information. Palantir, which has recently soared to become the 19th-largest publicly traded company in the nation, is making moves to align itself closely with the Trump administration.

White-collar workers, of course, are not confined to the private sector.

Teachers and their unions have long drawn the ire of Republicans for providing large sums of cash to liberal political committees and for allegedly pushing students to the Left. Indeed, the data show that teachers unions, primarily the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, spent nearly $50 million boosting the Left between 2023 and 2024.

The Washington Examiner’s analysis confirmed the liberal slant of teachers, documenting roughly $9.5 million to Harris and her aligned committees from donors who listed their occupation as some form of “teacher” or “educator,” compared to just $5 million from such individuals to Trump and his allied committees.

Moving up the chain, college professors also favored the Left, though perhaps not by the margins one would expect. Political contributions from donors who identified themselves as a “professor,” “academic,” or “lecturer” gave about 70% of their over $27 million in donations to Harris and her aligned committees, as opposed to Trump and his.

Students mirrored their teachers and professors in terms of political contributions, donating $1.1 million to the liberal committees and about $550,000 to their conservative counterparts.

While Republicans have continued to lose ground among white-collar professions, blue-collar Americans picked up some of the slack. Occupations such as truck drivers, plumbers, construction workers, carpenters, sales professionals, police officers, and members of the armed forces all favored Republicans in their donations, per the Washington Examiner’s analysis.

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One problem for Republicans, however, is that these professionals typically donated far less than their white-collar counterparts. Truck drivers, for instance, only donated around $1 million to the collection of conservative and liberal committees in 2024.

Many Republicans, however, likely aren’t counting dollars in this way. Instead, they see a vast sea of blue-collar voters who, regardless of whether or not they make campaign contributions, show up to cast ballots on Election Day. No amount of funds is worth more than the raw numbers of the American working class.

Robert Schmad (@robertschmad) is an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner.