What Do Troop Contributions Tell Us?
Friday, October 10th, 2008I was intrigued today by an item from Details Magazine‘s “Know and Tell” page — basically, their attempt at a Harper’s Index.
The item was on contributions to presidential campaigns from “U.S. troops deployed abroad as of June 30, 2008, according to campaign-finance filings released in August.”
The three amounts shown in the Details “infographic” are:
– $60,642 for Obama
– $45,512 for Ron Paul
– $10,665 for John McCain
The clear implication is that troops abroad prefer Barack Obama to John McCain — and even prefer Ron Paul to John McCain. This is supposed to be surprising given the stereotypical alignment of the GOP and our armed forces and given the supposed Republican advantages in matters of defense.
But these implications are suspect.
Most importantly, these numbers reflect contributions from the primaries, not the general race. So really all we’re seeing is that servicemen and women overseas were more engaged in the race for the Democratic nomination than in the race for the Republican nomination. And, really, who wasn’t?
Moreover, there were many more serious candidates on the Republican side — McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, Ron Paul — while the Democratic race was really a two-way contest, or three if you include John Edwards. So, it makes sense that contributions from trops for any given Republican candidate would’ve been smaller than for any given Democratic candidate.
An important number we’re missing is contributions to Hillary Clinton. If that number is near Obama’s receipts, than we know that these numbers really just reflect greater engagement with the Democratic race.
Also, let’s do a thought experiment: say these contributions were from after the nominees were determined. Would that mean that service-people actually preferred Obama to McCain?
I’d argue that the answer is no.
It’s possible of course that a majority of troops support Obama. But more giving to Obama than to McCain might only reflect a lot of giving from a still-minority segment of troops abroad who are Democrats or who support Obama.
How could this be? Maybe there are economic differences between troops who lean Democrat/Obama and troops that lean Republican/McCain, making the former group more able to contribute to the candidate of their choice.
Or, more interestingly, maybe, for Democratic service-people, contributing to their candidate is a salient way to express their Democratic identity in a milieu where the men and women around them all prefer Republicans.
In any case, that’s all thought-experiment speculation. What’s important is that these numbers don’t really tell us anything.