First of all: you’re good! I think there are lots of centrist and right-leaning people in academia who are doing just fine; especially in the US lots of world-class unis are in deeply conservative areas too. Most of academia don’t discuss politics that much at all as long as one cares about science. I’d wager the political leaning bias is more from a population bias rather than systematic discrimination of any sort

I could imagine AI researchers being more right-leaning yeah. The stats I got were from personal anecdote and research being done about this a short while back… there might have been an update in the AI age