[Peace-discuss] Which way will the army go?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Trotsky I think wrote that the final revolutionary question was which way the 
army would go.  Perhaps it's more relevant that it was the revolt of the US 
military in Vietnam that largely brought the American invasion to an end (after 
the virtual destruction of Vietnam) -- and that the opposition of the officer 
cadre of the present US military seems to be constraining plans for an attack on 
Iran. Here's some information on the present political attitudes of the US 
military.  --CGE]

	Taking Aim at the Military Vote
	July 22, 2008 11:10 AM

Barack Obama is playing to a variety of audiences while he travels abroad this 
week, with stops in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Europe. One of them is an 
interesting voting group that could pack some surprises: Active-duty U.S. military.

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. service members – including the 500,000 
currently serving overseas – are a disproportionately Republican and 
conservative group. But that assumption is challenged by a unique survey of the 
U.S. Army done in 2004 by Maj. Jason Dempsey, then of West Point, and Prof. 
Robert Shapiro of Columbia University, via Columbia’s Institute for Social and 
Economic Research and Policy.

Their data show that the officer corps indeed is disproportionately conservative 
and Republican – but that enlisted service members, who make up the bulk of the 
population, are not. They’re essentially no more conservative, and no more apt 
to be Republicans, than the U.S. population as a whole. Fewer are Democrats; 
more, independents.

On ideology, while 63 percent of Army officers identified themselves as 
conservatives, only half as many enlisted members, 32 percent, said the same. 
The combined total, 38 percent, is very close to the aggregate for the U.S. 
public overall in ABC/Post polls this year, 34 percent. Twenty-one percent of 
all Army service members were liberals – again roughly matching the U.S. public 
overall.

The survey had to estimate partisan identification in a roundabout way. It asked 
respondents to place the Democratic and Republican parties on an ideological 
spectrum, then to place themselves on the same spectrum, then asked if they 
identified with one of the parties (but not which one). The answers were used to 
project party allegiance.

The result: Fifty-one percent of Army officers were identified as Republicans, 
but that fell to 23 percent of enlisted personnel. The net was 29 percent – 
again very close to the public overall, 27 percent in ABC/Post surveys this year.

There was a big difference in estimated Democratic allegiance: Only 11 or 12 
percent of officers or enlisted service members were identified as Democrats. 
Instead 37 percent of officers, and a whopping 66 percent of the enlisted ranks, 
were independents, for a net total of 60 percent of U.S. Army personnel.

Independents, as it happens, are the quintessential swing voters in presidential 
elections.

              Ideology        Est. party ID
            Lib  Mod  Cons   Dem  Rep  Ind
Officers   14%  23    63     12%  51   37
Enlisted   23   45    32     11   23   66
All        21   41    38     11   29   60

Gen. pop.  23   40    34     37   27   31


(Army data from Jason Dempsey and Robert Shapiro, survey of U.S. Army personnel, 
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University. Gen. 
pop. data is 2008 ABC/Post aggregate.)

VOTE? – Another question is how many active-duty military actually vote. The 
Pentagon, which runs the Federal Voting Assistance Program aimed at encouraging 
turnout, commissioned a survey in 2005 in which 73 percent of uniformed military 
respondents reported voting in the 2004 election, compared with 57 percent in a 
2000 study. (See the full report here.) If so, that’s better than the 60 percent 
turnout among all eligible voters in 2004.

But the reliability of that survey is in question. Dempsey and Shapiro’s Army 
survey produced a much-lower 43 percent turnout figure for 2000. (Full 
disclosure: Shapiro consults with ABC News on exit poll analysis.) Dempsey is 
skeptical of the FVAP figure for 2004; as he puts it, take a bunch of 18- to 
24-year-olds, move them around every few years, and it’s hard to see 
three-quarters of them voting.

Moreover, the Government Accountability Office has raised questions about the 
FVAP survey, saying its "estimates and conclusions should be interpreted with 
caution" because of its response rate, which was low by GAO standards. Scott 
Wiedmann, deputy director of the FVAP, told me this week that his group agrees 
with the GAO criticism, avoids projecting the survey results beyond the 
individuals who participated (though the FVAP report doesn’t read that way to 
me), and is reworking the methodology to produce better data after this fall’s 
election. Wiedmann referred my detailed methodological questions to others at 
FVAP; see their reply here. (Aficionados will note the creative calculation of 
response rate, as well as the vote question that offers two yesses vs. one no.)

There’s also the question of overstatement of voting in polls, not just because 
of presumed social desirability bias, but also – and for my money, more so – 
because of civic-engagement bias – the fact that people who participate in polls 
are more civically engaged, and therefore are also more likely indeed to have 
voted. In any case, the FVAP reply to my questions goes so far as to predict a 
lower estimate for 2008, simply because they’ve tweaked their question wording 
to make it easier for respondents to say they didn’t vote.

The bottom line is that there’s plenty of room to debate both the size and 
direction of the military vote; Dempsey and Shapiro's data suggest you could 
drive a Humvee through the holes in the conventional wisdom on the subject. 
Dempsey will be reporting his full survey results in a forthcoming book on the 
social and political attitudes of the U.S. Army – meaning there may be more 
surprises yet to come.