Abby Vesoulis
June 6, 2025
"On Friday afternoon, thousands of veterans who fought wars on behalf of the United States descended on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to fight something else: cuts proposed by the Trump administration.
Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has moved to slash and burn the federal workforce—and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is no exception. Already, the sprawling agency serving America’s 16 million military veterans has fired 2,400 probationary workers and proposed eliminating an additional 15 percent of its workforce—about 80,000 people.">
That’s a misleading picture. Yes, the population of veterans did support Trump over Harris, but the population of veterans skews overwhelmingly male, white, and old.
Look at Pew’s 2023 survey. Among veterans:
Meanwhile, Biden probably won among active duty in 2020.
I suspect that if you surveyed veterans under the age of 50, you’d get a very different result. Or, if you surveyed the general non population but weighted it to be as old, white, or male as the veteran population, would the results be very different from veterans generally?
Wasn’t the shocking thing about trump election results was that he gained votes from non whites so assumptions on racial demographics ended up being unreliable?
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/11/06/hispanic-men-helped-propel-donald-trump-back-to-the-white-house
Assumptions about how younger people would vote is also what led to the shocking results
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Men still make up the majority of military
So question would be are active military members more likely to lean liberal or conservative compared to their demographic?