“Well I don’t know about all that. I heard Bob Beckel on The Five last night say....well 50% of the military voted for him (obama), how do you explain that? The Republicans response was...I don’t know.”
Oh, I think they know why, but they can’t say it. What they can’t say is that a large percentage of the military is black now days.
A clarification on those numbers. First, the 50-50 split was in Virginia, not nationwide. Secondly, the percentage of blacks in the U.S. military is about the same as it is in the general population. However, exit polling makes no distinction between active duty military and veterans; in other words, a 30-year military retiree is lumped into the same category as someone who served a single hitch back in the 1980s. Virginia has a large number of Africa-American veterans and retirees, concentrated in the DC suburbs and the Hampton Roads region. Their representation in the Virginia population is higher than the national average, since the state has such a large military/retiree population.
To their credit, Team Obama clearly identified who these people were and got them to the polls. By comparison, the Romney campaign just assumed that military personnel, vets and retirees would show up. Some didn’t, others didn’t.
And of course, the GOP slit its own throat by not doing more to protect the rights of military absentee voters. Tens of thousands disenfranchised once again, but Republicans never make more than a token effort to get the problem fixed.
Among active duty personnel, there was a 60-30 split for Romney (according to campaign polls), and I believe that number was fairly accurate. But if many of those individuals can’t vote because their ballot arrives late (or never at all), the GOP is giving away literally thousands of votes, every election cycle.
One lesson from this campaign is abundantly clear: demonization works. The VFW, American Legion, TROA, NCOA and others need to launch a TV campaign showing the faces of the service men and women who were denied the right to vote, along with those who are preventing it: Obama, Harry Reid and Leon Panetta. Keep running the ads until we get a military absentee voting system that works—and find a way to maximize the turnout for non-minority vets.