There's no single reliable source of information on political views of military personnel. But perhaps the best recent studies of military attitudes come from Jason Dempsey, an Army lieutenant colonel and veteran of West Point's social science faculty. Dempsey conducted exhaustive research on the attitudes of Army personnel, both through the analysis of older studies and through his own polling.
Overall, he found that social and political attitudes of Army personnel track fairly closely with the views of the civilian population. On certain issues, Army personnel are in fact decidedly more liberal the general population: in 2004 (the most recent year for which there is hard data), for instance, civilians were substantially more likely than Army personnel to oppose abortion under all circumstances, and large majorities of Army personnel supported increasing domestic government spending on education, health care, Social Security, and environmental protection.
To a significant extent, the perception that members of the military are "right wing" is a holdover from the post-Vietnam era. In 1976, a study by the Foreign Policy Leadership Project found that only 33 percent of military officers identified with the Republican Party. But the end of the draft and the advent of the all-volunteer military dramatically changed the military's character, making it smaller, more professionalized, and more isolated from mainstream civilian society.
After Vietnam, many of those who remained in the smaller force felt "abandoned" by the civilians who had sent them to war. By 1996, the percentage of officers identifying with the Republican Party had climbed to 67 percent (the same period saw only a slight rise in Republican Party identification among civilian elites).
But today, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. military is a different animal than the military of the 1980s and early 1990s. Today, the majority of senior officers continue to self-identify as conservative, but they make up only about 6 percent of the overall Army population. And Dempsey's research found that they are dramatically more conservative (and more Republican) than enlisted personnel and junior officers.
Given this, it seems likely that future studies of the officer corps will find fewer self-identified conservatives, as today's most senior officers -- who entered the military in the seventies and eighties -- retire and are replaced by a new generation.
Dempsey's most interesting finding, perhaps, is that self-selected political labels are extremely poor predictors of servicemembers' actual views on social, political, and economic issues. Regardless of how they label themselves to pollsters, for instance, officers' views on issues ranging from abortion to government spending on social programs tend, on the whole, to be moderate to liberal, while the views of enlisted soldiers tend to skew liberal.
The notion that "the military" is homogeneous and inherently right-wing is out of date and should be tossed into history's dustbin. "On the whole, military opinions tend to parallel civilian opinions," concludes Dempsey. "The idea that service members have a distinctly different worldview (that is, a ‘military mind') -- conservative and dramatically out of step with the rest of society -- is a myth that must be constantly debunked."
So what does all this mean for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? Polls on 2012 presidential voting preference are contradictory, with some suggesting that military personnel and veterans support Romney, and others giving the edge to Obama.
But insofar as money talks, data on political donations in the 2012 presidential cycle suggests diminished military enthusiasm for the Republican Party. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks campaign contributions, military contributions to Barack Obama's campaign have so far outstripped contributions to Mitt Romney -- by a ratio of almost two to one.
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