Is the Military a Bastion of Right Wingers?
The conventional wisdom is that the military is overwhelmingly Republican. In fact, the Military Times last week showed that the armed services planned to vote for McCain over Obama by nearly 3-to-1. However, when Maj. Jason Dempsey started looking a little more closely at the respondents of the poll he found that they tended to be white, older, and more senior in rank.
Dempsey (not only is he a battalion operations officer at the Army’s 10th Mountain Division but has a PhD from Columbia University in political science) and Robert Shapiro conducted the first and only random sample survey of enlisted personnel, junior officers as well as their superiors. So what did they find? According to Dempsey:
The Army, it turns out, is hardly a bastion of right-wing thought. It is true that the upper echelons of the military tilt right. My own research confirmed that about two-thirds of majors and higher-ranking officers identify as conservative, as previous studies found. But that tilt becomes far less pronounced when you expand the pool of respondents. That is because only 32 percent of the Army’s enlisted soldiers consider themselves conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and the remaining 45 percent are self-described moderates. These numbers closely mirror the ideological predilections of the civilian population…The Army, it turns out, is hardly a bastion of right-wing thought.
Read the rest of the article in The New Republic.
Comments
It is possible that they are still right of center, but think they are moderate or left of center in a relative sense because the group is right wing.
I have a family member who works for a non-profit. Though she is left of center she often feels as though she were right-wing due to the company she keeps, and she describes herself as a moderate.
Posted by: OneEyedMan | October 28, 2008 04:09 PM
One wonders whether the difference between the opinion/identification distribution of enlisted personnel and junior officers, and the more conservative senior officers, is a) generational; b) due to self-selection (i.e. are the conservatives more likely to stay in uniform?) or c) due to selection bias (i.e. are the more conservative seniors more likely to promote the careers of the conservative juniors than those of the more liberal juniors?).
Posted by: Alan G | October 28, 2008 04:22 PM
My former roommate in college was an Army officer (just left after he returned from Iraq this spring), when I visited him before he was deployed his career Army boyfriend (yep) referred to Rumsfield as an “ass monkey.” So, I guess even conservative career guys may be looking for change.
Posted by: Doug H. | October 28, 2008 05:02 PM
How do Dr. Dempsey and Dr. Shapiro get around the U.S. code that puts up restrictions against surveys of members of the military?
http://vlex.com/vid/19191074
Am I missing something here either in their analysis or the laws of the U.S.?
Posted by: RE | October 29, 2008 01:32 AM
The restrictions against surveys of military personnel appear to involve only questions about their vote choice.
Posted by: Joe | October 29, 2008 10:14 AM
Joe is correct. Polls administered for partisan political purposes are prohibited. The C&S Survey did not ask about vote choice. Within the TNR article the shifts among ‘senior officers’ documented from ‘04 to ‘07 are done using Military Times survey data.
Posted by: jkdemp | October 29, 2008 02:38 PM
Alan G— the answer is a and b, with primacy to ‘a’. No evidence for c was found at all, although if you re-phrase it, and talk about self-selection into service, then there is strong evidence for that in the military academy data we also collected in 2004. (addressed in more detail in the book).
Posted by: jkdemp | October 29, 2008 02:48 PM