I was just wondering if there are any “reliable” polls which indicate how many people in the armed forces of the United States are Republican and how many aer Democratic.
Also if there are any numbers which show how many of the Armed Forces voted for GW Bush in the 2004 election.
I haven’t been able to find anything more than guesses on line by bloggers
Keeping the word “reliable” in mind, my suspicion is that since a pretty fair percentage of members of the military are young enough never to have voted, that such a poll would be skewed to older individuals. Even then, declaring one’s party preference as opposed to having registered in that party might also skew results. At best, a poll of that type would be inconclusive, if not useless.
Also note that this is merely a suspicion.
Duke University political science professor Peter Feaver has studied this issue more than anyone else.
The breakdown in the enlisted ranks is about a third Republican, a third Democrat, and a third independent. This reflects the disproportionate number of minorities and working class whites in the enlisted ranks.
Among officers, there is an eight to one Republican to Democrat advantage. This is driven by the reluctance of educated liberals to choose the military as a career, for various reasons.
Although the poster asked for “reliable polls” anecdotally, I’d support the Officer portion of that. As a military Officer, it’s rare to hear an Officer declare that he’s a Democrat.
Here’s a 1999 article directly citing some of Feaver’s findings:
I’ve seen this referenced before, and I thought it was a snarky quote (not by you of course) then as I do now .
It’s not like these Officers “abandoned” anything. The officers who join and/or remain in the military are by and large Republican. It’s not like they were neutral or independent and somehow abandoned some middle-of-the-road belief to go to the dark side or something.
Right. As I said above, it is driven on the officer side by a reluctance by college educated liberals to choose a military career, or even a stint in the military for a few years.
Now, I see this as a major problem, myself, but discussions along these lines went exactly nowhere in the past, and this isn’t the right forum to debate them again.
I agree, but I would guess that this misleading implication is simply caused by a clumsy use of a direct quote from the Feaver & Kohn digest cited in the article.
I can’t check the cited Feaver & Kohn digest directly (it used to be here), but I suspect that what it actually said was something more like “the US military has largely abandoned political neutrality in the composition of its officer elite as a feasible goal, due to the overwhelming preponderance of Republicans among officer candidates” blah blah blah.
I strongly doubt that anybody among the authors of either the cited digest or the linked article actually meant to assert that individual officers deliberately decided to stop being politically neutral, which is indeed an absurd-sounding idea. (Why would we expect an individual representative of any professional group to be politically neutral in the first place? Yeah, members of the military should not use their official positions as a platform for public political partisanship, but there’s no reason that they have to be neutral in their individual political views.)
I concur that it is a problem. I think that the military is drifting further and further away from main stream America, or America is drifting away from the military. When I was growing up in Connecticut (I’m 44 and grew up in a blue state) many of my fathers friends had at least served in the military. Now I have friends and acquaintces, who say I am the only person that they know that is, or was in the military. I think that the United States once had a military that was composed of the people, from their neighborhoods, or brothers, or cousins. That is no longer the case. And if there becomes a rift between the military and the American people at large, there could be some serious implications.
Well, from what Mr. Moto said, it actually is the case for enlisted servicepersons, at least as far as political affiliation goes: the rank and file of the military appear to be split roughly equally among Republicans, Democrats, and independents.
Where the enlisted personnel are demographically skewed is socioeconomically and racially: they include disproportionately large numbers of minorities and poor people. So “the people” who are underrepresented in the military are actually only the middle-class or affluent white people—especially the non-Republican ones, since the officer ranks are so heavily Republican. The rest of “main stream America” (and what is that, anyway?) is still very visible in the military.
Well, there is also the problem that the enlisted ranks tend not to be very ideological, on either side. That is not the case among the officers, who tend to be better educated and thus more opinionated.
The people who are Republicans or Democrats for cultural or economic reasons (evangelical Christians, black or Latino servicemembers) tend to cluster in the enlisted ranks, while those who are Republicans or Democrats for ideological reasons cluster in the officer ranks. It is here that there is a near complete absence of ideological liberals, and no shortage at all of conservatives.
Mind you, I was enlisted myself, although I was a well educated and ideological enlisted man. 
Still, I could see these trends, and the data in the Feaver studies backs this up.
According to the March 22 issue of The Economist:
The party is losing support even among the once solid armed services. Today only 46% of servicemen describe themselves as Republican, compared with 60% in 2004—and only 35% of them approve of the handling of the war.
The Economist does not cite the source for this statistic.
Watch out – John Kerry got severely criticized for publicly stating this factual item.
My point was (as we are hijacking this op) that there was a time from roughly 1918 through, well about 1990 that most Americans could almost universally feel connected to the military. (1990 is arbitrary on my part. I picked that out because it was a generation after the end of the draft (1973) and the end on the Reagan cold war build up.) During that time there were drafts (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam) where Americans were by-and-large drafted or joined the military regardless of social standing, with Vietnam being a potential exception. Even Robert Kennedy served as an enlisted man in the Navy. It would be almost impossible to imagine that today. And in the pre-draft days, the government had to garner support from the American people, because support for the draft was critical to the war effort. So there was a huge pool of men, and some women, who had at least done their four years of service, who understood what the military was like, and felt some connection to the military
That isn’t the case now. I think you may be correct. The poor see the military as a way to get education and get of out their current economic situation. Conservative white upper middle class conservative still send their sons and daughters to the military, but frequently into the officer ranks. That leaves a whole portion of both conservative and liberal middle class and affluent people who wouldn’t ever think of joining the military, and doesn’t have any reference points via classmates, brothers, uncles, etc. They wonder what crazy, dumb people would join the military. When I say we are the say guys that you went to school with, and dated your sister in High School, it just doesn’t register. And that divide can be ultimately unhealthy for the nation.
Add to that the the military encourages its members to vote and to be well-informed of the issues on the ballots.
I was under the impression this is the approximate proportions found in the American population in general (1/3[sup]rd[/sup] each of Rep., Dem., and independent). Is this not the case?
Yes, more or less. I think what Moto means is that based on political ideology alone, we would expect the enlisted ranks to skew disproportionately Republican, just as the officer ranks do. But because the enlisted ranks contain a disproportionate number of minority and poor people joining the military primarily for economic reasons, we get more Democrats enlisting than we expected to see.
In the officer ranks, where the applicant pool is drawn mainly from more affluent groups, ideology trumps economic necessity as a motive to join the military and we get the expected strong Republican bias in the membership.
Mr. Moto should correct me if I’m misrepresenting his argument, of course.
I am a not miltary expert or even an American but I did watch “The War Tapes”. In one scene a soldier clearly states that the vast majority of soldiers vote Republican. The ones who vote Democrat don’t talk too loud about it.
Kimstu writes:
> Where the enlisted personnel are demographically skewed is socioeconomically
> and racially: they include disproportionately large numbers of minorities and
> poor people.
This is slightly misleading. Poor? Well, in some sense they are, but this doesn’t mean that most of them are from, say, the lowest 10% of the population in family income. I think a better statement would be that the families that enlisted people came from overwhelmingly tend to be from above the lowest 10% in income and below the top 40% in income. Truly poor people (the lowest 10%, I mean) tend not to enlist, often because they don’t even graduate from high school and, if they did, tend not to do well on the tests given to potential enlistees.
It’s also not the case, I believe, that Hispanics, Asians, or American Indians are overrepresented among enlisted personnel. Only blacks are overrepresented, and not hugely overrepresented. I believe about 20% of enlisted personnel are
black, while 12% of the American population is black.
spifflog writes:
> Conservative white upper middle class conservative still send their sons and
> daughters to the military, but frequently into the officer ranks.
Upper-middle-class families (say, any family above 85% in income and below the top 2% income) don’t tend to have sons or daughters in the military, even as officers, regardless of the political opinions of the family. And I’d be surprised if there is a single child of a truly rich family in the U.S. armed forces, regardless of the political opinions of the family. Officers tend to come from middle-class families (from above 50% in income to about 85% in income). There are also a reasonable number of military people who started as enlisted personnel and then finished their college degrees and became officers.