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Can Trump count on the military to vote Republican in 2020? Millennials bring shift

For decades, the majority white male U.S. military has been largely Republican — but the 2020 vote is a lot less predictable, election experts, former officers and military advocacy groups said.

President Donald Trump is responsible for some of the shift, they said, due to erratic public policy changes he’s announced by tweet, his volatile public falling out with former Marine Corps Generals James Mattis and John Kelly and his disparaging remarks about war heroes, including late Sen. John McCain.

In the end, how the military votes may have more to do with the more progressive social views of the Millennial generation now serving, and with their exhaustion over the government’s inability to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans interviewed by McClatchy said.

“What you have seen in probably the last 10 years is that they are increasingly less partisan and they are identifying less with the political parties and are more issue-oriented,” said Marine Corps veteran Dan Caldwell, executive director of the conservative-leaning Concerned Veterans for America.

Former SEAL Team Six leader Robert O’Neill was part of the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and is a Trump supporter. He recently had to push back on Trump when the president retweeted a QAnon conspiracy theory that bin Laden wasn’t really dead.

“I’ve met most of the Trump family, I’ve had dinner at the White House with President Trump and I know he loves the military — there’s no doubt in my mind,” O’Neill said. “I know morale really went up when he was elected. But stuff like [the QAnon conspiracy] it’s just an unnecessary retweet. Someone as president of the United States should be a little more careful.”

Those types of incidents could drive away some military voters, he said.

Controversy erupted after a European trip where Trump reportedly called the war dead in Europe “suckers” and “losers,” which was first reported by The Atlantic, an allegation that the president has denied.

O’Neill hadn’t heard those Trump comments but did hear him disparage McCain, “and that’s unfortunate,” he said. “You shouldn’t say that about Senator McCain. That’s going to sway some votes.”

Trump gained early fans within the Pentagon through his selection of generals he touted as straight from “central casting” — Mattis to run the Pentagon and Kelly to run the Department of Homeland Security and eventually serve as his chief of staff.

Trump also earned high marks within the Pentagon for loosening restrictions on senior officers’ ability to conduct military operations without facing White House micromanagement, a central complaint of Pentagon leadership under former President Barack Obama.

But the honeymoon between Mattis, Kelly and Trump was short-lived. Trump notified the Pentagon of key national security policy shifts, such as his announced withdrawal from Syria and a ceasing of major military exercises with ally South Korea by tweet.

Trump was not interested in their input, especially on foreign policy, said retired Navy Cmdr. Guy Snodgrass, who served as Mattis’ speechwriter during his time as Defense secretary and published a tell-all book about the schism, “Holding the Line,” in 2019.

Among military personnel, ”more skew towards the Republican Party, but this has shifted during the Trump administration, especially from those with direct knowledge of the administration’s actions relating to intelligence, military and foreign affairs,” Snodgrass said.

In August, Military Times released its annual poll of service members, one of the only political pulse readings conducted of those actively serving.

The poll found that support for Trump among the 1,018 active duty troops surveyed had fallen to 38 percent in 2020 from 46 percent in 2017. Of those respondents in the August poll, 41 percent said they were voting for Biden; 37 percent said they planned to vote for Trump; 13 percent would seek a third-party candidate and 9 percent said they did not plan on voting.

“Donald Trump’s numbers are beyond dismal in the military, especially for a Republican,” said Jon Soltz, an Army veteran who deployed to Iraq twice and founded the 700,000-member VoteVets, a progressive-leaning veterans’ political advocacy organization. “The idea that veterans and the military are heavily Republican is just not true anymore.”

Mattis resigned in protest in December 2018 and publicly excoriated Trump in a June 2020 article in The Atlantic, after the president used National Guard forces to clear peaceful protesters from in front of the White House after the death of George Floyd. In his criticism, Mattis stopped short of endorsing Trump’s Democratic opponent Joe Biden.

In September, however, the No. 2 ranking military officer who served under Trump did endorse Biden.

Retired Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Trump administration and who was reappointed by Trump in 2017, signed a letter in September with hundreds of other national security leaders denouncing the president.

“The current President has demonstrated he is not equal to the enormous responsibilities of his office; he cannot rise to meet challenges large or small,” stated the letter, which as of Oct. 30 had been signed by 780 former military officers, former Defense Secretaries Ash Carter and Chuck Hagel, who served under Obama, and scores of former civilian defense officials.

But will the schism between top former military leaders and Trump shape the votes of the 1.3 million currently serving forces? Not as much as their own more diverse backgrounds and exhaustion with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans groups said.

“At least since after Sept. 11, the longer a party has been in the White House, the less popular they’ve been with the military,” said Veterans Campaign founder and Marine Corps veteran Seth Lynn.

The post-9/11 generation now makes up the majority of veterans running for office, and among them are the most the women veteran candidates since at least 2000, according to new data released Thursday by Veterans Campaign and Military Times.

There are 28 female veterans running for House and Senate seats this year — 16 Democrats and 12 Republicans.

Overall in the 2020 election, there are 163 candidates running for a U.S. House seat and 19 seeking a Senate seat who served in the military, the data found.

Among the House candidates, 113 served in the military after 9/11. Among that group of veterans, 81 are Republicans and 32 Democrats. In the Senate, 11 of the 19 candidates served after 9/11, seven of them are Republicans and four are Democrats.

While there are still more Republicans, there’s been a consensus across the political groups that both sides of the post-9/11 veterans candidates favor making changes to U.S. foreign policy.

“More and more veterans and even active duty families are becoming fed up with our endless wars,” Concerned Veterans For America’s Caldwell said, and it is one of the main issue areas where the organization joins forces with more liberal veterans organizations to lobby Congress.

Of the 1.3 million serving, white males still make up the majority. They represent 58 percent of the 1.1 million enlisted forces and 65 percent of the military’s 211,000 officers, according to 2017 Defense Department data, which was the latest available.

But the military’s composition is also shifting. The data found that in 2017, the number of females serving “reached its highest level ever in the history of the U.S. armed services,” with 16 percent among enlisted and 18 percent among officers.

In 2000, George W. Bush’s campaign attorney David Aufhauser fought to get late-arriving military absentee ballots counted in Florida, on the assumption there would be more Republican votes for Bush than Democratic votes for Al Gore.

“It was essential to winning Florida and winning the election,” Aufhauser said.

This year it’s more of a gamble, he said.

“I think today, 20 years later, it’s not so clear that intuition or speculation is any better than a 50-50 bet,” Aufhauser said. “The leanings of men and women in uniform around the globe may be more towards the center.”