DM Poll Makes Waves in the Military Community

Unscientific polls are not worth very much. Except when they start conversations. And a poll I designed for Doctrine Man is doing exactly that.

I am bringing the poll here to Daily Kos for two reasons:

• to explain the less than scientific methodology and
• to ponder in a progressive and liberal space about what this poll might mean

I also want to state, for those of you who might think that I am promoting a third party candidate, that I am not. I am bringing information that may or may not matter to the Democratic Party. You can take this with a grain of salt or you can take it as a warning. Your choice.

History of the Doctrine Man Voter Survey

Over at Doctrine Man, sometimes referred to as DM, we share a wide variety of articles, almost all of which pertain to military life in some way, shape, or form. Political posts (because, at the end of the day, military life is controlled by politicians) always garner lots of comments. Those comments generally span the entire political range from liberal to conservative to everything in between. We have Hillary haters and Trump adorers. We have I’m With Her and I’m Against Her. We have #DumpTrump and #TP2016. And we have a fair sprinkling of those looking for a third party candidate and others that are still crying Bernie. And a couple that just want General Mattis. 

Basically, we’re a mixed up bunch. A couple of weeks ago, we posted a story about Donald Trump and asked people to post in the comments who they might vote for. Remember, this is a military crowd and active duty folks are loath to share those opinions in public. But we also have retirees, veterans, family members, civilian employees, etc. and many of them were willing to say that they would vote for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.

Those of us behind the scenes at Doctrine Man decided we just had to design a poll to figure out exactly where the community stood.

Who is Doctrine Man 

Enter myself, Angie Drake, a professed independent registered in the state of Alaska and a proud Air Force military spouse. I have volunteered the last two presidential campaigns for Barack Obama. I have volunteered for progressive organizations like MoveOn.org. I am a firm believer that the military community vote is important and that military spouses should feel free to campaign as much as they like. And I have written extensively about the intersection of politics and military life here at DailyKos.

I went to one of my partners in crime, Steve Leonard, the founder of Doctrine Man and an Army Veteran. A few months ago, we merged the Keep Your Promise page, where I was a dedicated volunteer, with Doctrine Man, in order to have a wider and more engaged audience. It worked. We have over 152,000 followers and our engagement numbers are through the roof. Steve now has more behind-the-scenes help and KeepYourPromise has a place to post advocacy information when it needs to be shared without having the daily maintenance of a Facebook page.

If we had to chose a political place to be as a team (there are more than just the two of us), it would have to be mixed. In fact, we probably span the political continuum. And, unlike Congress, we are able to work together as an effective team. We decided together that a survey had to happen.

Doctrine Man Voter Survey Design

Our first choice of survey was to go through SurveyMonkey. It’s a great tool. But they limit responses to 100 and then you have to pay. We have a budget of $0. So that choice failed the budget test.

We decided to go with a Google Form. And we decided not to require a log-in. A log-in would have prevented many active duty from participating. There is no way they want their name attached to a political choice. That also meant that people could vote more than once. We asked that they not do so. And the truth is, we trusted our own community. I can make no guarantees that people didn’t vote multiple times nor that the libertarian community (nor any other voting block) didn’t spam the poll. Votes came in pretty consistently the first couple of days and the overall percentages remained consistent as well. We saw no spikes of activity that would have hinted at spamming. And, in fact, the latter days of the poll we only saw a few new voters.

Our target audience was obviously Doctrine Man. But we did pay to boost the survey on Facebook to “friends of friends” in hopes to gain a broader military community response. And we asked folks to share the poll with family and friends. In order to be wide-open, I will let you know that I shared with family and friends (a good political mix of liberals and conservatives), I shared the poll directly with John Q Public in hopes of getting more Air Force eyes (DM can be a little Army centric at times), with a group of Navy Spouses (hoping to get more Navy eyes on the poll), and with a friend who is a veteran that often works for Democratic causes. I did not post the survey here at Daily Kos.

We chose to ask four questions. The first asked who would be their choice in the upcoming November election (Trump, Clinton, Castle, Stein, Johnson, Other Third Party, Write-In, Will Not vote, and Undecided). The second asked to identify which part of the military community they belonged to (Active Duty, Reserve or Guard, Retired, Veteran, Family of all the above, or other). The third asked to identify branch of service (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, or other). And the last asked if they were registered to vote (more than 95% said yes).

We opened the survey on Wednesday, July 13 and ran it for just under a week to allow for wide distribution. The survey closed Tuesday, July 19, at 8pm EST.

Doctrine Man Survey Results

We had 3,556 responses. And Gary Johnson, the Libertarian party candidate, made an impressive showing.

The results were eye-opening for many. We chose to share them first with TheHill.com and they ran with this headline: Poll: Libertarian Johnson beating Trump, Clinton among active troops. The article is making huge waves at has been shared more than 47,400 times as I write this paragraph.

Many commenters on the Doctrine Man facebook page wonder if the poll was spammed — we think it is more likely that we have many libertarian followers and they shared the poll in their circles. The question becomes is this a poll that reflects the DM community or does it reflect the military community? And we don’t know the answer that.

We would like to know that answer. But without a budget to run a controlled, scientific survey, we are not sure how to ever find out. We are open to ideas on how we might accomplish this without a budget.

Add to that that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General Joseph Dunford recently warned troops to take care that they conduct themselves in a way that the next administration has confidence it would be served by an apolitical military. The powers that be probably wouldn’t want to see such a poll succeed.

I have confidence that our military can serve the people’s choice even when that choice may not match their own. After all, it is statistically impossible that every military member voted for Barack Obama yet today’s military functions well. The same can be said for other administrations. Our Constitution makes it quite clear that the military will be led by a civilian and that said civilian is the President of the United States, politics be damned.

Military Families May Vote Differently Than Active Duty

But it isn’t just the possibly military Libertarian leanings that are interesting. For me, I found the difference between the active duty vote and their family members to be even more striking.

If the election were to be decided by military family members, Hillary Clinton would win a plurality of the votes (or at least, according to the Doctrine Man Survey). But it would be a very close election.

As an active campaigner for Barack Obama, I know that military spouses can make a difference in a political campaign. And this may be a push that Hillary Clinton could use.

Military spouses who volunteer for campaigns make great first contacts for likely voters who identify as veterans. If the Clinton campaign choses to use the training from the Obama election, where volunteers were taught to use their personal stories to help undecided voters chose Obama, it could be a huge positive for Clinton. These volunteers will need to be well trained. Data from the DM voter survey tells us that veterans and retirees are pulling towards either Trump or to Johnson. Volunteers need their own personal stories to be clean and tight… and then they need to be able to answer the questions that are bound to come, what about the emails? and what about Benghazi? And answering those questions with comments like “You should stop watching Fox News” will not garner any new voters.

Undecided voters, even undecided veterans, can still be swayed… they can still determine an election. Our unscientific poll shows 9.8% of the active duty family members as being undecided. There are 7.2% undecided in the veteran and retiree community. Add to that those that claim that they will not vote and that is a healthy population to help swing this election.

The people that answered this survey are the ones paying attention. We know that there is an untapped population that are turned off by politics and by political conventions. Come Fall, they will be ready to have the conversation. But will the Clinton volunteer team be prepared to sway them?