Mean common-space CFscore of reliable individual donors, by most-recent occupation, with 95% confidence intervals. Negative = left/Democratic, positive = right/Republican. Pooled across 1980–2024.
Takeaway: academia, the sciences, the arts and tech anchor the left; agriculture, oil and gas, and the building trades anchor the right. The order is the diploma divide.
Reliable donor = gave to at least eight distinct recipients and is not a projected ideal point. Occupation is the donor’s most-recent self-reported title, classified by a committed keyword crosswalk (occupation_crosswalk.yaml); the field measures occupation, read here as a proxy for the credential divide. Retired, homemaker, student and unemployed donors are tabulated separately, not shown. Source: Stanford DIME v4.0.
Every field moved left — but kept its place in line
Mean CFscore of each occupation among donors who first became active by 2002 vs. donors who entered in 2014 or later (most-recent occupation). Blue = high-credential, red = proprietor/extraction.
Takeaway: the recent-entrant pool is uniformly more left — a composition effect of the ActBlue era, not opinion change — yet the credential professions stay left of the extractive trades in both columns. The order survives; the level shifts.
Cohorts defined by first cycle active (early ≤ 2002; recent ≥ 2014). Caveat: occupation is most-recent only, so a donor’s current field is applied to their whole history — this is a backfill approximation, and the cohort view is compositional (which donors, binned by current job with fixed scores, are active in each era), never within-person movement. Categories with under 200 reliable donors in either cohort are omitted. Source: DIME v4.0.