Sports fans generally don’t want politics mixed in with their entertainment. Sports are meant to be an escape and an opportunity for people from all walks of life, all creeds, and all political leanings to band together to support their favorite team.
Professional sports leagues often do their best to inject left-wing messages into sports. From “pride nights” and rainbow uniform accents to the “black national anthem” to virtue-signaling athletes and coaches, professional sports leagues don’t leave their politics at the stadium gates.
Side note: This is part of the reason why I gravitate toward college athletics. There’s far less of a chance for politics to invade a college game — even in the most liberal of college towns.
But what about professional athletes themselves? Where do their political preferences lie? Some athletes can be pretty obnoxious about their politics, right or left, while others make quieter statements.
Which leagues are more liberal, and which skew more conservative? An organization called VoteHub did some digging and found out.
VoteHub used voting records to determine where players in various professional sports leagues leaned politically. Spoiler alert: A large number of athletes consider themselves independents, but where athletes lie on the political spectrum is fascinating.
Here’s the money quote from the intro: “Using voter file data from 23 states and the District of Columbia, we’re able to venture into new territory and collect the party identification on 1,506 athletes across the ‘Big Four’ of North American professional sports leagues, plus the WNBA. The analysis that follows reports results by league.” That’s right: no illusions that the WNBA is a big deal.
Let’s start with the not-Big-Four WNBA. This will be the result that will shock you the least. Just over two-thirds — 67.5% — of WNBA players are registered Democrats. Only 2.3% are Republicans, while 30.2% are independents.
VoteHub explains:
This result is probably the most expected. Harris won around 60% of the vote among young women, and higher among Black [sic] women (who constitute a majority of the league). Women’s basketball might have the highest percentage of out players of any major sport. There are so many examples of players expressing support for Democratic candidates and liberal causes that it would be pointless to recount here. To continue the use of BLM as a barometer, prominent players were backing the movement as early as 2016 and the league essentially moved as one to rebuke former Atlanta Dream co-owner and Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler over comments critical of BLM. The league also has the highest partisan identification of any of the 5, at 69.7%, although that slice is evidently dominated by one party.
Another league with a less-than-shocking political makeup among its players is the NBA. Democrats make up 42.9% of the league, while Republicans account for one-tenth of the players. “Other” claims 1.2%, but most surprisingly, a plurality of NBA players are independents at 45.9%.
“Again, demography explains the partisan leaning of the player base here,” VoteHub explains. “The vast majority of the NBA is black, and young black men have historically been a strong constituency for the Democratic Party despite recent slippage.”
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The NFL is a mixed bag. A little over a third of NFL players — 34.3% — are Democrats, while only 20.2% are Republicans. That pesky “other” claims 1.2%, while a vast plurality of 44.3% identifies as independents.
“It’s fitting that America’s Game has the most politically diffuse player base,” VoteHub admits.
Because American players only account for 30% of NHL players, the sample size was much smaller. Republicans make up 43.9% of the NHL’s talent base, and independents claim the lead at 48.6%. Whatever “other” is accounts for 1.9%, but the most striking stat is that only 5.6% of NHL players are Democrats.
VoteHub explains:
Hockey has struggled in similar ways to baseball with how to address hot-button cultural issues. Pride jerseys were replaced with pride tape due to player complaints, which were themselves banned before being reinstated; no current or former NHL player has identified as LGBT. They also experienced a reckoning during the BLM movement over the frequently hostile environment for Black [sic] players. The league has probably distinguished itself as the most conservative of the Big Four.
Finally, there’s Major League Baseball. MLB has the most conservative player base by a long shot; 53.7% of MLB players are Republicans. Independents make up 36.4% of the talent pool, and 2.1% are “other.” Only 7.8% of MLB players are Democrats.
Naturally, VoteHub hedges. The report includes a caveat that baseball is an overwhelmingly white sport, particularly among voting-eligible players. It also went out of its way to basically say that just because an MLB player is a Republican doesn’t mean that he likes Donald Trump. WHY?
Of course, at the end of the day, none of it matters. Fans are going to support their teams regardless of the players’ political leanings. Sure, we may roll our eyes at more politically obnoxious athletes and at league stunts, but for the most part, we can all enjoy our sports free from political interference.
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