CHICAGO ― Once strongly aligned with the GOP, American physicians are leaning more left, an analysis of campaign contributions over two decades shows.
The first rigorous look at donor doctors also finds they’ve become increasingly generous, with political contributions surging to almost $200 million in recent years.
An increase in female doctors—who more often than men donated to Democrats—and a decline in physicians working on their own or in small practices occurred during study years. Those changes likely contributed but reasons for the political shift are unclear, said study co-author David Rothman, a social medicine professor at Columbia University’s medical school.
“We’ve got to stop thinking of physicians as a group as ‘solidly Republican.’ They are polarized, almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats,” Rothman said.
The study focused on donations of $200 or more to presidential and congressional candidates or political organizations from 1991 through 2012. At the beginning, almost 3 percent of U.S. doctors made contributions, rising to almost 10 percent by the end of the study.
Doctor donations to Republican candidates peaked in the mid-1990s, when almost 75 percent of all MD contributions went to the GOP. Those donations mostly declined after that, to about 50 percent in 2011-12. The exception was in 2009-10 during emergence of the Affordable Care Act, when Republican donations briefly increased.
Donations from non-physicians also increased and tilted more Democratic during the study, but the authors say the MD findings are remarkable for two reasons: they defy the historical image of doctors as a conservative, right-leaning bunch, and political contributions from doctors increased at a greater rate than among the general public.
