I can't believe people are taking seriously this report showing a shift in the political contributions of active duty personnel away from the Republican party. The report says that contributions to Democrats have jumped to 40 percent this year from just 23 percent in 2004. That would be surprising--even though 60 percent support for Republicans would be considered an enormous landslide in any other subset of Americans--if this was actually an election year. Because it isn't, the numbers are minuscule compared to the contributions of 2004: just $330,000 so far, compared to $1.8 million for 2004.
Anytime you get a sample size that small, you are bound to have some weird things happen--like the fact that Ron Paul has raised more money so far among the military than any other Republican. Ron Paul also won the 'text your vote' portion of the last Republican presidential debate on Fox with some 35 percent support, and yet his support here on planet earth hovers around 1 percent last I heard. What does that mean? That Ron Paul's supporters are passionate. While the rest of the military is unlikely to even pay attention to the presidential contest until some time next year, a couple hundred Ron Paul supporters are sending in contributions--and furiously texting their votes to Fox.
A similar explanation can be applied to why it is that Democrats have closed the fund raising gap a bit among active duty personnel. The soldiers, sailors, Marines, etc. who are frustrated with this administration's policies are paying close attention, and sending money to candidates who they hope will offer a change of course.
The drop in contributions to Republicans-which began nearly the second the war in Iraq did in early 2003-seems to suggest that there is a passionate group of people in the armed services who are looking for ways to express their opinion, said John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute. "This [data] suggests that among the military, the people who feel most intensely about the Bush administration and the war in Iraq are negative about it," Samples said.
I don't doubt that there might be a slight shift, but it is way too soon to tell. $27,000 to Obama--and he's in the lead? Even if you assume that no one mailed in more than $20, that's only 1,350 people, out of an Armed Forces numbering more than 2 million. I'm no statistician, but I would think that any serious analysis would conclude that Mr. Samples's sample size is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions about overall trends.
There are no reliable polls of the active duty military to check this against. Military Times surveys its readership, but those results are skewed by the fact that their participants are disproportionately drawn from the officer corps. And still, their survey found a margin of 72 to 17 in favor of Bush in the last presidential election. Any survey that shows Ron Paul to be a major force isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
