<p>I would say that MIT on the whole is left of center but not extremely so. I always felt (coming from a more liberal living group than average - see below) like the true political divide was liberals vs. libertarians, not liberals vs. conservatives. It certainly was, and is, in my social group.</p>
<p>People tend to be fairly practical in their approaches to things. This guards against fringe views in any direction. However, it also leads to an attitude that gets mistaken for apathy, because people don’t feel like the standard easily-accessible political outlets are useful for accomplishing things, and given how busy they are, they aren’t going to bother if they don’t think it will accomplish things. So you don’t see a lot of demonstrations, for instance, and the ones that you see are normally about very local (i.e. MIT-specific) issues. But, I certainly knew people who canvassed or phone banked for Kerry and/or Obama, and people who are active with specific political groups.</p>
<p>There are political differences between majors and between living groups. A few years ago, Chris V. played around with Facebook and made graphs of political stance vs. major and political stance vs. living group. The data was collected when the '09s were frosh, so it’s a bit old, but I suspect that it still provides a decent rough picture.</p>
<p>[Facebook</a> Social Analysis: Fun with Facebook](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/varenc/www/facebook.html]Facebook”>http://web.mit.edu/varenc/www/facebook.html)</p>