Doctors split the vote. Their teachers have a one-party problem

Left-wing ideology has taken root in medical education, and it likely isn’t the work of a mere vocal minority. Federal campaign contribution records from donors who listed a U.S. medical school as their employer show that about 87% of contributions went to left-wing candidates, party committees, and political action committees, and just 4% went to right-wing ones. As donors tend to be more extreme than average voters, this is both evidence of and a possible explanation for the institutional capture of medical education more broadly.We searched the Federal Election Commission database for donations made between Jan. 1, 2025, and Sept. 2, 2026, entering the full name or a common variant of every U.S. medical school in the employer field and excluding donors who listed their occupation as “student.” (Also necessarily excluded were medical-school employees who listed only the parent university as their employer, those whose listed employer was ambiguous between the medical school and a similarly named hospital or clinic, and donations with the employer misspelled.) This returned partisan political contributions by employees at approximately 72% of U.S. allopathic (Doctor of Medicine degree-granting) medical schools.Further, at about 72% of allopathic medical schools whose employees have made partisan donations, those donations have been exclusively to the Left, and individuals have donated more than 20 times as much to the Left as to the Right. An additional roughly 14% of schools have just one Republican-leaning donor but multiple Democrat-leaning donors. Although employees of osteopathic (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree-granting) medical schools are much less politically active financially — only 26 of 47, or about 55%, of these schools had at least one employee who made a partisan donation — their political leanings are very similar; about 73% of those schools don’t have a single right-wing donor.Doctors are split roughly evenly between the two parties. Not all medical-school employees are doctors. Nevertheless, federal campaign contribution records suggest that medical schools are likely far more politically one-sided than the medical profession as a whole. Across all the allopathic medical schools with financial political activity, there were more than 25 times the number of Democrat-leaning donors than Republican-leaning ones, and 20 times the number of donations to the Left than the Right. (All figures refer to federal donations, not state ones.)Multiple studies have found that donors from both parties are more ideologically extreme than the average voter, including primary voters. Small donors, which many medical-school employees are, are no exception.Some may argue that everyone is entitled to his or her political views — and they are — or that professionals set politics aside at work. But the latter likely isn’t happening. This ideological capture of the majority of medical schools could explain why racial discrimination and the incorporation of left-wing doctrine into what should be apolitical science classes have become so commonplace. Most medical schools maintain diversity, equity, and inclusion infrastructure, and among the schools that provided admissions data to Do No Harm prior to summer 2025 (all allopathic), 57% admitted a pool of black applicants whose average Medical College Admissions Test score was lower than the average score of rejected Asian applicants.Take the donations that came up when we searched “Yale School of Medicine” and “Yale Med School,” for example. Is it any wonder that a school whose employees seem to have made over 1,700 donations to the Left and not one to the Right incorporated political advocacy into its curriculum or renamed its Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Collaborative Excellence while keeping all its staff and adding more? Is it any wonder that such a school was found by the Department of Justice to have discriminated by race, with the DOJ’s analysis indicating that black applicants had as much as 29 times the odds of getting an interview as equally qualified Asians?OPINION — CHRISTA PIKE WOKE UP: WITH A 7% BOTCH RATE, LETHAL INJECTION IS AN ENGINEERING DISASTEROr take Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, which we searched as “SIU School of Medicine,” and found more political donors among its employees than at any other public allopathic medical school. Despite its location in an evenly split county that went red in 2024, over 97% of its employees’ donations were to Democrat-aligned PACs, candidates, and party committees. Therefore, the school’s long history of DEI should come as no surprise. Nor should the 2024 admissions data that show Asian applicants had just 12% the chance of admission as equally qualified black applicants, and that the average MCAT of rejected Asian applicants was about the same as that of accepted black applicants.Data from medical schools of all stripes throughout the country suggest that ideological capture of medical education is not the product of a few activist faculty members, but of a broader institutional culture. Short of a commitment to ideological neutrality and to teaching only science, the politicization of medical education won’t stop.Naomi Risch is a Do No Harm senior research associate.