At one time, knowing whether someone was a blue-collar or white collar worker helped you to predict how they voted--blue-collar workers were more likely to vote for the Democrats. That's no longer true, or is true to only a slight extent. But casual observation suggests that there are differences among occupations--for example, if someone is a university professor, it's a good bet that he or she voted for the Democrats (or at least didn't vote Republican). It's hard to go beyond casual observation, since most opinion surveys don't ask about occupation. However, the General Social Survey asks about exact occupation and codes it into detailed Census categories, and you can combine years to get a larger sample. I did this for two periods: 1972-88 (which covered the 1968-1984 presidential elections) and 2000-2018 (1996-2016). I computed the occupation effects on vote for president (omitting people who supported third-party candidates), controlling for race (black/non-black), education (have/don't have a college degree) and log of family income. This let me get estimates for about 350 occupations. The most Democratic and most Republican occupations in each period:
Most Democratic
1968-84 1996-2016
Maintenance workers, machinery Biological Scientists
Reservation & transportation agents Judges and magistrates
Actors Medical records technicians
Meter readers, utilities Writers and authors
Weighers, measurers, checkers Social and human service assistants
Pumping station operators News analysts, reporters
Procurement clerks Tax examiners and collectors
Other education, training, and library Public relations & fundraising managers
Crushing, grinding, mixing workers Psychologists*
Therapists, all other Food service workers, non-restaurant
Most Republican
Optometrists Credit authorizers, checkers & clerks
Health practitioner support techs Engineers, all other
Printing, binding, and finishing workers Logging workers
Computer & info. systems managers Office machine operators, exc. computer
Architectural and engineering managers Print binding and finishing workers
Pharmacists Pharmacists
Chemical processing machine operators Dining room & cafeteria attendants
Industrial engineers economists*
Insurance underwriters Parts salespersons
Software developers, applications & systems upholsterers
Because of small numbers, there's a good deal of uncertainty in the estimates for many of these occupations (or you could say that to a large extent being in the extremes is a matter of chance), but there's still a noticeable pattern: the most Democratic occupations of the early period were mostly blue collar or lower white collar, while the most Democratic ones of the later period are mostly professional; the most Republican go from mostly managers and professionals to a wide-ranging mix.
To get a more general picture, I used the top-level census categories. There seemed to be a lot of variation within "professional and related occupations", so I broke that one into the next level. Here is a figure showing the relative positions of the groups in the early and recent periods:
The ones above the line moved towards the Democrats (in relative terms). The biggest moves were legal; education, training, and library; "life, physical, and social science"; and computer and mathematical occupations. On the other side, resource, construction and maintenance, architecture and engineering, production, and social service (which includes clergy) moved towards the Republicans. The changes led to a good deal of reshuffling of relative positions--resource, construction, and maintenance was the 10th most Republican (out of 14) group in the early period and third most Republican in the late one; on the other side, computer and mathematical occupations went from second to tenth. Legal occupations were the second most Democratic in the early period, and became even more Democratic in the late period.
*Professors of psychology or economics are classified as "post-secondary teachers," so these are psychologists and economists who work outside of universities.
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