A few weeks ago, at a debate for Republican presidential candidates, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) made the ridiculous claim that U.S. troops and their families are, by their very nature, conservative. “[M]ost Americans, most kids who leave that — that breakfast table and go and serve in the military and make that corporate decision with their family — most of them are conservatives.”
Even on its face, it was an absurd argument, but the evidence to disprove Hunter’s claim keeps piling up.
Close family members of U.S. troops are split on whether the Iraq invasion was a mistake, and 55% disapprove of President Bush’s job performance, according to USA TODAY/Gallup Polls focusing on immediate relatives of servicemembers.
“They’ve maxed out on the troops. You’ve got guys who are over there on their fourth or fifth tours. It’s ridiculous,” says Jeanette Knowles, 40, of Mountain Home, Idaho, whose brother, Jeff, served a tour in Iraq with the Oregon National Guard. […]
“I don’t want to see another Korea. I don’t want to see us stay there (in Iraq) forever. And you don’t want to be in a country if they don’t want us there,” says Bruce Bartley, 65, of Fredonia, N.Y., whose son, Army Capt. Steven Bartley, is on his second tour in Iraq. The elder Bartley, who describes himself as a conservative, disapproves of Bush’s job performance and says the invasion was a mistake.
These results mirror, and come on the heels of, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released a few weeks ago, which found that nearly 60% of military families disapprove of the president’s performance and his handling of the war in Iraq. Among those families with members serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, six in 10 say the war has not been worth the cost.
Perhaps most importantly, a clear majority (58%) of these families “favor a withdrawal within the coming year or ‘right away.'”
I’m of course looking forward to congressional Republicans smearing these families as “cut and runners,” and Limbaugh blasting them for being “phony military families.”
It’s worth remembering that this is a trend that’s been ongoing for a while. Bush and the GOP assume the troops and their families are politically and ideologically in line behind them, but assumptions like these are mistaken. Remember this Military Times poll from a year ago?
Moreover, there’s a partisan shift apparently underway. Brandon Friedman at Vote Vets noted, “Way back in the day, many of us voted for George W. Bush. Personally, I cast that fateful vote for him in 2000–when I was 22 years old, and just over a month away from being commissioned as an Army officer. I figured I was doing my duty. I thought that Republicans supported the military. But I didn’t make the same mistake in 2004. After one deployment to Afghanistan and another to Iraq, I’d finally learned my lesson.”
It’s a sentiment that’s catching on.
When military families were asked which party could be trusted to do a better job of handling issues related to them, respondents divided almost evenly: 39% said Democrats and 35% chose Republicans. The general population feels similarly: 39% for Democrats and 31% for Republicans.
“The Democrats are not seen as the anti-soldier group anymore,” said Charles C. Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University.
Let’s not brush past that too quickly. Despite the perceived connection between the military and the GOP, and arguments that the troops and their families are necessarily conservative, military families prefer Democrats to Republicans on issues relating to their needs.
It’s a welcome change.