RollingStone | No other 2020 candidate for president, including Donald Trump, can come close to matching Bernie Sanders’
level of support among members of the U.S. military, to go by the most
recent campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission.
Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have donated a total of
$185,625 to Sen. Sanders’ 2020 campaign. By comparison, they have given
$113,012 to Trump, $80,250 to Pete Buttigieg, $64,604 to Sen. Elizabeth
Warren, and a relatively paltry $33,045 to former Vice President Joe
Biden, according to Doug Weber, a senior researcher at the Center for
Responsive Politics.
For every candidate in the 2020 race, the CRP maintains a list of the
20 companies or institutions whose employees have given the most money
to his or her campaign. Remarkably, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the
U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Department of
Veterans Affairs all separately appear on Sanders’ list,
comprising 5 of his top 20. The largest service branch, the U.S. Army,
comes in at number 11, with $65,395 in total donations. That’s just
behind Walmart, whose employees gave $69,523.
Sanders’ support from employees of Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, and the U.S. Postal Service has been reported, but the strength of his appeal to the armed forces has gone largely unnoticed.
If Sanders wins the nomination and his financial support from service
members translates into votes, it would represent a significant shift
from 2016, when active-duty personnel were twice as likely to choose
Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2016, the Military Times sent a
confidential survey to its 59,000 subscribers in the armed forces. The
respondents preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton by a “huge margin,” and were nearly three times more likely to identify as Republican than Democrat.
