VIDEO: San Fran residents displeased with Pelosi, whose Dem party received mega money from higher ed
Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Lawrence Jones appeared on Hannity Wednesday to discuss his recent trip to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district in San Francisco, where he asked constituents about the quality of Pelosi’s leadership. Jones specifically asked residents about the city by the bay being overrun by needles and feces.
”It’s pretty bad...city hall, it’s beautiful. Nice scenery. Beautiful weather. Kind of makes it a drab when you walk around and you see needles. Close to a playground. Feces everywhere. The smell of it all,” one person said.
Another person said that Pelosi is “absolutely” responsible” for all the drugs and homelessness. Yet another chimed in by saying that Pelosi is “old blood. We need new blood in there.” “I think she is status quo,” another said. But while many Jones spoke with while in San Francisco are unsatisfied with Pelosi’s leadership, Pelosi’s Democrat Party, which has run the city for decades, still has the strong financial backing of one key demographic: college faculty and administrators.
A Campus Reform analysis has found that an overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators at colleges in newly elected Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s California congressional district (CA 12th) contributed financially to Democrat candidates and causes from 2017-2018.
The analysis found that 99.36 percent of college administrators and 99.33 percent of faculty in D-CA 12 donated to Democrat candidates or causes.
The colleges analyzed here are City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC Hastings, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Babson College at San Francisco, UC San Francisco, and the Academy of Arts College.
Colleges in Pelosi’s district were identified through several key-word searches and map overlays. In the event a college in Pelosi’s district was a branch of a larger institution headquartered outside of the district, only donors who specified the branch within the district as their employer were considered in the data pool.
Campus Reform analyzed the donation records of college employees from 2017-2018, using publicly available records from the Federal Election Commission, in order to determine the political leanings of faculty and administrators at the college.
According to a Campus Reform analysis, 99.4 percent of all administrators who donated to political candidates or causes gave a total of $90,467.15 to Democrat politicians or Democrat organizations, such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Doug Jones for Senate Committee.
In total, CA-12 higher education employees donated $1,363,751.67 from 2017-2018. Of that amount, 97.54 percent went to Democrat politicians or Democrat organizations, while just 2.46 percent of the donations were made to Republican politicians or Republican organizations.
Only one administrator and six faculty members out of all colleges reviewed donated Republican.
Eight-hundred eighty-nine faculty members, specifically in the district, donated a total of $835,660.87 to politicians or political organizations. They contributed 99.41 percent of the money to Democrat politicians or organizations. Just .59 percent of donations, given by six faculty members, went to Republican causes or politicians, like Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
Meanwhile, 156 administrators donated $90,467.15 to Democrat political candidates and politicians, such as Tammy Baldwin’s senatorial campaign. According to the records, there was only one donation made by an administrator to Republican politicians or Republican organizations from 2017-2018.
Swing Left and Act Blue received the highest amount of donations in the Democrat category.
For the purposes of this data, Campus Reform defined “faculty” as employees of the college that have direct instructional contact with students, such as professors, teachers, and instructors. “Administrators” were defined as employees who manage programming or are responsible for students and faculty, such as department chairs, deans, presidents, and provosts.
Campus Reform sorted individual donors using their stated position at the college. For example, if the individual donor noted that they were a “professor of literary theory,” they were designated as a faculty member. If an individual noted that they were employed as an “executive director,” they were designated as an administrator. In the event an employee’s title was ambiguous and could not be confirmed, they were marked as general employees, but not sorted into faculty or administration categories. Campus Reform used a variation of keyword searches to cull data specific to colleges within the 12th District in California.
Campus Reform used the most recent FEC donor records from Jan. 1, 2017 to Oct. 22, 2018.
Editors note: this article previously listed Heald College as a data point. Heald College closed in 2015 and no donations were pulled from the FEC database when Campus Reform gathered its report. Heald College has been removed from the list of analyzed colleges, but the results of the investigation into donation records remain unchanged.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @Grace_Gotcha
