Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Red State Chickenhawks

Not only do the Blue States pay the preponderance of taxes to the Federal government which then proceeds to spend most of its take in the Red States, it seems that the Blue States are also suffering a disproportionate share of the casualties from the Iraq war. I guess they figure what's some extra deaths of folks that weren't going to vote for them anyway, right.

And lest you wingnuts bleat that most of the military is Republican, well that's not true. Recent polls show that a majority of enlisted personel are Democrats while a similar percentage of the officers are Republican. So, who do you think has a greater chance of dying in combat, a general or a pfc. You do the math.

from democratic underground via captain normal:
Anyone else sick of being told by Bush voters that people who don't support the war are helping the terrorists? Anyone else sick of brave Republican warmongers finding all kinds of reasons not to join the military, despite the growing recruitment crisis? You may be interested to know that a breakdown of the Iraq war dead shows that more come from states that voted for John Kerry. In general, the bluer the state, the more dead soldiers.

Check out these maps:

Now with the ol' Red vs. Blue map superimposed:

For some reason I expected to see more of the staunch Bush-voting "heartland" Republicans out west doing their bit for the cause...

3 comments:

halcyon67 said...

Yea, and apparently liberals are treasonous and hate the military.

Mitch H. said...

Fred, that looks to my half-trained eye to be a population distribution scatter, with a slight bias towards the rural. Try a county map, instead, and see what falls out. Considering that the military trends something like 75% conservative/Republican, I suspect you're neglecting the "blue state/red voter" factor.

handdrummer said...

Actually, the officer corps is 75% Republican. The enlisted men and women tend to be evenly split or a weighted a little toward the Democrats.

Shouldn't be surprising. The enlisted troops are largely recruited right out of high school and tend to be from a lower economic background. Working class city folk tend to be Democrats and in states like PA, CA, and NY working class folk of all types, city and rural, do also.

Officers are largely recruited out of college. They are usually middle class and up because their folks could send them to school. ROTC officers split about half and half, which is why you get the reasonably large size group of Democrats.

It's one of the distortions being promulgated by Rove and his minions that Democrats don't volunteer, thereby making the liberals seem to be cowardly or unpatriotic. I can assure you that my family are strongly left wing Democrats and 5 of them are serving right now (including two as officers). And they report a mix that jibes with these surveys.