U.S. Military Personnel, Veterans Give Obama Lower Marks

June 2, 2011

Our military personnel and those currently on active military duty are less likely to approve of President Obama’s job performance than are Americans of comparable ages who are not in the military.

The results are based on an analysis of more than 238,000 interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking from January 2010 through April 2011. Respondents were classified as veterans/active-duty military based on responses to a series of questions probing whether any member of the household had served in the U.S. military, and whether the respondent himself or herself had served and, if so, whether the respondent was currently on active duty. Americans currently serving in the military overseas or on ships at sea would not be included in this national cell and landline telephone sample.

Gallop’s “bottom line” has it that Americans who currently serve or previously served in the U.S. military are less likely to approve of the job President Obama is doing than are those who have not served in the military, by about 10 percentage points. This approval gap occurs across age groups. For younger, post-draft-era veterans, individuals with certain regional, demographic, or psychographic backgrounds may be more likely to be Republican and more likely to join the military. For older veterans, their service in the military may have led them to a more Republican viewpoint on politics, either during their service or in later years. Whatever the cause, Gallop says the data are clear: having served in the military is associated with a more Republican and less Democratic political identity and that the most reasonable hypothesis may be that the socialization process that took place as part of military training and service, coupled with the impact such service has on an individual’s reflection on politics and policy later in life, had a greater impact on the observed more Republican orientation among these veterans.

Could it also be that more military personnel and vets (than are in the general population) have a better perspective on the value and importance of an ‘un-transformed’ America and of our nation’s role in the world than do the Left and their apologists and supporters in the Democratic Party? This is something I’ve often thought to be the case, albeit there are indeed exceptions to this ‘rule’(?).

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Written by Jo & Ray · Filed Under Politics 

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