Of all the people running for president, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign is receiving the most donations from active military service members. According to Seth Harp at Rolling Stone magazine, even Donald Trump does not have the level of support that Sanders does.
Culling through research done by the Center for Responsive Politics, Harp reports that Sanders tops the list with $185,625 in active-duty U.S. military donations. This is more than twice the amount the next top Democratic candidate has received (Pete Buttigieg at $80,250), but most surprisingly, it is considerably more than the $113,012 pulled in by the Trump reelection campaign.
The interesting thing about these numbers is that Trump was “preferred” by active military members according to a survey done by the Military Times in 2016. It also goes to show that while Trump’s isolationist campaign platform was appealing to military personnel, Trump’s inability to keep only his most racist campaign promises while jettisoning the rest has clearly hurt him among the military community.
Sanders has been a very consistent, anti-war foreign policy advocate for many years, and that combined with Donald Trump’s reckless foreign policy moves over the past three years has probably led many relatively conservative military types to move away from the Republican Party’s current standard bearer. A chicken hawk billionaire doesn’t change his stripes.