Divine Wind
Platinum Member
Agreed about polls. Still, a majority of vets have less confidence in Hillary than in Trump. Not an unexpected result in an election featuring the two most loathsome candidates in living memory. This helps explain why so many are for Johnson; vet and active duty know it is their civic duty to vote, but they can't hold their nose long enough to vote for either Hillary or Trump.
The good news for liberals is that military vets and active duty only constitute a very small demographic thus Hillary can blow them off like Liberals usually do.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box...p-leads-clinton-among-military-veteran-voters
Fifty-five percent of active and former military members support Trump, while 36 percent back Clinton. But nearly half — 47 percent — say they are not confident in Trump's ability as commander in chief of the military. Sixty-four percent said the same about Clinton.
This Election Is Testing The Republican Loyalties Of Military Voters
Hale, now a philosophy major at the Miami University of Ohio, is one of22 million veterans living in the United States, a powerful demographic group that trends Republican. There are also 1.3 million active-duty military members, 1.8 million dependents and nearly 741,000 U.S. civilian direct hires. Active-duty military service members are not allowed to speak on the record to the press about their political affiliations, but a July survey by Military Times (described as unscientific, since respondents opt in) found that they preferred Trump to Clinton 2 to 1, though the majority dislike both candidates (61 percent in Trump’s case and 82 percent in Clinton’s).
An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll in mid-August found that Trump was leading Clinton by 10 points — 51 to 41 percent — in military households, even after he angered many veterans groups by feuding with a Gold Star Muslim family that had lost a son in Iraq. (Blacks and Latinos in military households chose Clinton over Trump, though by lower margins than among the general population.) A Fox News poll in early August found Trump ahead of Clinton by 14 points in early August among veterans. But that lead is smaller than those of previous Republican candidates, possibly because of Trump’s remarks about the Gold Star family and his criticism of military interventions. At this point in the cycle, John McCain had a 22-point lead among veterans in 2008, and Mitt Romney was up 24 points in 2012.
Military voters, notes Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University, encompass a wide range of demographic groups and ideologies, with the most senior military professionals tending to be the most conservative and Republican. The reason Trump is not doing as well as previous Republican candidates with military voters, he said, is that Trump’s message might resonate more with World War II and Korea veterans, who are aging and passing on. In particular, he calls Trump’s relationship to the Vietnam cohort of veterans “fraught.”
“Take our two iconic Vietnam vets — [Sen. John] McCain and [Secretary of State John] Kerry,” said Feaver, who held national security roles in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “The Kerry version of the Vietnam vet is not going to find Trump appealing. And you might say the McCain version would, but one of Trump’s first actions was to mock McCain’s time as a POW. He also dodged the draft more noticeably than any other Republican candidate for president.” At the same time, he said, Clinton remains unpopular with many veterans, in part because of Benghazi and the cutback on military spending under Obama (though Clinton is likely to be more hawkish than Obama).
With all this in mind, digging deeper into past voting patterns, veterans chose congressional Republicans by 20 points in 2014, and they voted for Mitt Romney by the same margin in the 2012 presidential election. Research by academics David L. Leal and Jeremy Teigen looked at the likelihood that veteran males identify as Republican and vote for Republican candidates when compared to similar non-veteran males.
In 2008, they found a slight GOP advantage among veterans. About half of non-veterans voted for Obama, compared to 65 percent of veterans who voted for McCain.....
