Poll Results: Does The U.S. Military Prefer Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Or Bernie Sanders?
A new poll conducted by the Military Times apparently provides some insight as to which U.S. presidential candidate is favored by active-duty soldiers and reservists.
According to the nonscientific results, GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump has double the support among the troops than his Democrat counterpart, Hillary Clinton, for commander-in-chief. In fact, Clinton barely edges out the dissatisfied cohort not planning to vote for either of them.
Several national polls recently claimed that Trump is closing in on Clinton among the civilian electorate too.
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Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist running for president as a Democrat, does better in a matchup with Trump, but the New York real estate mogul still wins based on the Military Times survey findings.
Trump also emerged as the most popular candidate in a March Military Times survey when six individuals were still contending for the White House.
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None of the three remaining presidential hopefuls have served in the military, but Trump attended New York Military Academy for five years.
“Although he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft, [Trump] has said that the school provided him ‘more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military,'” the Washington Post reported earlier this year.
The Military Times invited almost 60,000 subscribers to take the survey in early May and less than 100 responded about their voting preference in the November general election.
Within this small sample size, Donald Trump received support from 54 percent of the service members as compared to Hillary Clinton’s 25 percent and those not voting ranked 21 percent. When Bernie Sanders is substituted for Clinton, Trump wins 51 percent to 38 percent, with 11 percent in the non-voting category.
“The results, while not a scientific sampling of military voting patterns… show strong support for Trump among troops despite critics’ attacks that he lacks foreign policy or national security experience…Officers were more likely to back Clinton than enlisted troops, though the officers still favored Trump by a 46 percent to 32 percent tally. Enlisted respondents broke 58 percent to 21 percent for Trump,” the Military Times added.
Female soldiers much prefer Clinton to Trump, however, while Trump gets the most support from these serving in the Marine Corps and the Army, according to the Military Times.
A poll of active military personnel conducted by Military Times. @realDonaldTrump @TrumpNewsNetwrk @mitchellvii pic.twitter.com/mStgAyZFiW
— SCPatriot (@patriots4trump) May 9, 2016
“Does the fact that Trump is more of an isolationist and would be less likely to get us involved in an overseas conflict make a difference to our troops? For some, perhaps. But Trump has promised to raise defense spending in response to the terrible state of readiness of our military. You would think that would matter more to our soldiers rather than whether Hillary Clinton would be more eager to use military force than Trump,” the American Thinker observed.
Trump has also vowed to straighten out the VA hospital system where many ailing vets have gone untreated and languished on waiting lists.
A Military Times poll in December, 2014, consisting of 10,000 respondents suggested that incumbent President Barack Obama had a record-low approval among the troops.
Although service members tend to tilt Republican historically, the Inquisitr reported in March of 2014 that George W. Bush received a much higher approval rating among Iraq and Afghanistan vets — regardless of their political affiliation — than Obama. The vets’ support of Bush, Democrat Obama’s GOP predecessor in the Oval Office, is even more striking in that only 44 percent of the vets in the survey felt that the war in Iraq was worth fighting (and just 53 percent for Afghanistan). Of those vets polled, 65 percent nonetheless indicated that Bush was a good commander-in-chief; only 42 percent gave Obama a thumbs up based on the Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation national poll.
[Photo by Evan Vucci/AP]
