Taking Aim at the Military Vote

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.

Read the full article at ABC News.