Bernie Sanders Leads Trump, All 2020 Candidates in Donations from Active-Duty Troops

[melman]

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.

People employed by the military 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 five of his top 20. The largest service branch, the U.S. Army, comes in at number eleven, with $65,395 in total donations. That’s just behind Walmart, whose employees gave $69,523.

If Sanders wins the nomination and his financial support from servicemembers 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.

But Trump’s support appears to have waned, leaving an opening for a Democrat this time around. In October 2018, a follow-up poll found that Trump’s popularity among active-duty personnel had faded noticeably, with half of respondents saying they were “unhappy” with the president. The FEC data suggest that Trump’s standing has deteriorated even further in the last two years, given that the troops are now donating much more to the peacenik senator from Vermont.




https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-sanders-leads-trump-all-2020-candidates-in-donations-from-active-duty-troops-946188/

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended

Thanks for the thread melman.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

2. nOboDy lIkeS hIm!

[lapucelle]

3. Where's the data about "active-duty troops"?

These are donations from people employed by the Defense Department and/or employed by/in the various branches of the military.

Where's the data that supports the claim made in the headline?

[George II]

4. Since 71% of his contributions are unitemized, don't know this. And these aren't necessarily....

....accurate numbers anyway. It's essentially an "educated guess" by OpenSecrets:

They're The organizations listed as "Top Contributors" reached this list for one of two reasons: either they gave through a political action committee sponsored by the organization, or individuals connected with the organization contributed directly to the candidate.

Under federal law, all contributions over $200 must be itemized and the donor's occupation and employer must be requested and disclosed, if provided. The Center uses that employer/occupation information to identify the donor's economic interest. We do this in two ways:

First, we apply a code to the contribution, identifying the industry. Totals for industries (and larger economic sectors) can be seen in each candidate and race profile, and in the Industry Profile section of the OpenSecrets website.

Second, we standardize the name of the donor's employer. If enough contributions came in from people connected with that same employer, the organization's name winds up on the Top Contributor list.

Of course, it is impossible to know either the economic interest that made each individual contribution possible or the motivation for each individual giver. However, the patterns of contributions provide critical information for voters, researchers and others. That is why Congress mandated that candidates and political parties request employer information from contributors and publicly report it when the contributor provides it.

In some cases, a cluster of contributions from the same organization may indicate a concerted effort by that organization to "bundle" contributions to the candidate. In other cases—both with private companies and with government agencies, non-profits and educational institutions—the reason for the contributions may be completely unrelated to the organization.

Showing these clusters of contributions from people associated with particular organizations provides a valuable—and unique—way of understanding where a candidate is getting his or her financial support. Knowing those groups is also useful after the election, as issues come before Congress and the administration that may affect those organizations and their industries.

https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/contributors?id=N00000528

[democrank]

5. Recommended