Joe Biden at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia in 2014. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The theme of this week’s presidential campaign news cycle—and maybe the theme of the entire next month, until the debates create additional Pundit Content—is whether Donald Trump can win back white voters by presenting himself as the candidate who’s tough enough to enforce “law and order.”
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The first part of this strategy is to wildly exaggerate the amount of property damage and rioting and general unlivability associated with civil rights protests in major cities. The second part is to suggest that only someone as strong as Trump is can end the unrest—something he routinely threatens to do by unleashing the full attacking power of the police, various federal law enforcement agencies, and the military. The final night of the Republican National Convention was an attempt to support this strategy by presenting Trump as the chosen candidate of America’s true-blue tough guys, with the president receiving on-camera endorsements from New York City police union leader Patrick Lynch, mixed martial arts promoter Dana White, erstwhile 9/11 hero Rudy Giuliani, and hawkish Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.
According to a poll released Monday, however, Trump does not even have the support of the most canonically tough and patriotic demographic group in American politics: the troops. According to the Military Times, active-duty U.S. service members say they are planning, by a margin of 43.1 percent to 37.4 percent, to vote for Joe Biden over Trump. The incumbent president’s approval rating with service members stands at 38 percent, with 50 percent disapproving.
This line from the Military Times’ write-up captures why this result, for Trump, is Quite Bad:
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About 40 percent of troops surveyed identified as Republican or Libertarian, 16 percent Democrats, and 44 percent independent or another party.
The individuals polled were for the most part not partisan Democrats; 93 percent of them were white. It does not seem like a great speculative leap to say that the Military Times surveyed a voter cohort that is one of the most receptive imaginable to traditional GOP messages about law and order. Biden still won that cohort by 6 points.
Some caveats: The poll was taken before the RNC, which put a heavy emphasis on property damage that occurred concurrent to protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon. The Military Times also notes that since it contacts respondents by using its own subscriber information, its sample may skew toward “career-oriented” service members. On the other hand: In an October 2016 Military Times poll that used the same methodology, Trump led Hillary Clinton by 20 points.
It also turns out that the troops themselves don’t support the idea of sending in the troops:
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Almost 74 percent of those surveyed disagreed with Trump’s suggestion that active-duty military personnel should be used to respond to civil unrest in American cities, including the ongoing racial equality protests.
Forty-eight percent of military respondents, moreover, identified white nationalism—an ideology Trump has allied himself with, and which appears to have motivated members of the MAGA “militias” who attacked protesters in Kenosha and Portland—as “a significant national security issue.” It’s tough to argue that you have the solution to a problem when your solution thinks you are the problem, if that makes sense.
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