In Iraq, some troops see Obama as best bet
There is little conclusive data, but informal surveys show growing numbers willing to switch to the Democratic side.
Reporting from Baghdad and Washington — Presidential election exit polls showed that the economy was uppermost on the minds of most Americans. But when Baghdad-based Army Maj. Ian Howard cast his ballot, his top concern was whether this would be his last deployment to Iraq.
So Howard, a lifelong Republican, threw his support to Barack Obama, who has advocated a swift withdrawal of U.S. forces.
"I don't want to come back here for another tour," Howard said Wednesday. "Obama gives me confidence I won't be back here in two, three or four years."
Experts who have researched voting trends within the military say there is little conclusive data on the political choices of active-duty service members, largely because their numbers are too small to show up in nationwide electoral surveys such as the Gallup Poll.
But slivers of data -- such as exit polling of military veterans and campaign contribution lists -- suggest that support for Republican presidential candidates within the U.S. military has declined over the last eight years, enabling Obama to increase Democrats' take of the military vote Tuesday.
"The military, over time, tracks with civilian society," said Peter D. Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University and author of a book on military voting. "You put it all together, and my best guess, my educated guess, is that Obama did better than [John] Kerry did -- but he didn't win the military demographic."
Without scientific polling -- because the Pentagon, which frequently reports on troops' views on their housing and healthcare, shies away from partisan questions to avoid politicization -- researchers are left to rely on anecdotal and voluntary surveys to get a sense of where the military vote is moving.
In Tuesday's election, 15% of voters were military veterans, and 54% of them voted for John McCain -- a 3-point decrease from Bush's take in 2004, according to the National Election Pool exit poll.
In addition, campaign support for Democratic presidential candidates also increased during the just-ended election cycle. The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations, said that through 2007, Democrats received 40% of the $804,000 in contributions from uniformed service members, up from 18% in 2000.
The center said that by the end of August 2008, Obama had received more money from military donors with overseas addresses -- $74,650 compared with $16,600 for McCain -- as well as from employees of the uniformed branches: $340,400 compared with $321,500.
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