Will Vets Again Push Trump to Victory?

Vets in swing states made Trump commander-in-chief in 2016. Can it happen again?

Long before Donald Trump became the Republican party’s 2016 presidential nominee, GOP officials plotted a path to electoral victory that relied heavily on veteran voters.

This work was launched in the summer of 2014, when Retired U.S. Navy Captain Bob Carey got a call from Sean Spicer, a fellow Rhode Islander and Navy veteran who was then the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) communication’s director. 

Spicer tasked Carey to create a potent organizing apparatus that would get veterans out to vote for whomever secured the nomination. Carey was perhaps the best man for the job. Between 2009 and 2012, he led up a $50 million initiative at the Department of Defense (DoD) to protect and advance the voting rights of military personnel and overseas citizens. Under Carey’s watch at the DoD, military voter participation jumped by more than 20 percent. As the inaugural director of GOP VETS, Carey was armed with a multi-million dollar budget and a similar mandate: increase turnout.

By September 2014, Carey had begun assembling a team that would quickly grow to 50 full-time veteran organizers. He set up state task forces in swing states with high veteran populations, including North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Staffers trained hundreds of volunteers on veterans issues, sent out thousands of mailers, and had veterans knock on more than one million doors.

“What we found, albeit in limited data, was that when a veteran knocked on a door or made a call, the door stayed open twice as long, twice as often,” Carey told me when I reported on his work in 2018 for The New York Times At War section (RIP). “Simply because veterans are part of the last trusted intuition in America: the military.”

Staffers not only engaged in phone-banking and door-knocking – two staples of any political campaign – but also spent time speaking to veterans at VFW halls, Student Veterans of America meetings, and air shows. “I swear, by the end of that work, if I saw one more Blue Angel air show, I could have announced it myself,” Carey joked, making reference to the Navy’s elite flight demonstration squadron.

One might think that the RNC’s moves would have been matched by the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Yet in the run-up to the 2016 election, the DNC declined to collect veteran voter data, and employed just one part-time staffer focused on veterans’ issues. (This staffer left his post before Election Day.) Republicans say they almost never came into contact with Democratic organizers on the ground in 2016. “The only folks I ever saw were from ‘Veterans for Bernie,’” Carey recalled.

The RNC’s well-oiled 2016 machine was bolstered significantly by the Koch-backed group Concerned Veterans of America (CVA), which, way back in 2012, had planted organizing seeds in communities across the country. By 2016, this work had yielded a group of 12,000 highly active volunteers. In the month before before Election Day 2016, this network made one-million phone calls and knocked on 100,000 doors in a cluster of swing states.

On November 8, 2016, Trump’s showing with veterans was historic. While decorated Vietnam War veteran John McCain won the veteran vote by ten points during his 2008 presidential bid, Trump, who viciously insulted McCain on the trail, took veterans by a whopping 27-point margin.

According to a revealing but under-discussed political science analysis of 2016 voting data, Trump received exceptionally high support in American communities with the highest combat casualty rates. This support was especially key to his victories in three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In other swing states, Trump flipped key districts with high military populations. One was in Ohio’s Montgomery County – home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base – which broke for Trump after voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

GOP officials have been far more tight-lipped about their veteran work this cycle, in part, it seems, because they’re in a weaker position.

They’ve lost Carey, their organizing guru, who now runs advocacy over at a veterans’ charity called The Independence Fund. The Koch network, meanwhile, has declined to lift a finger for Trump. CVA is still working to excite veteran voters, but this work is centered around issues — namely ending the Forever Wars — and Congressional candidate who support their vision.

Trump’ 2020 campaign has established an influential crew of surrogates under the banner “Veterans for Trump.” They include former CVA staffer Darin Selnick, former Benghazi Annex Security Team member John “Tig” Tiegen, and viral YouTube comedy twins Keith and Kevin Hodge. (A tip for readers: all HodgeTwins merchandise is 20 percent off with code “ChineseVirus.”)

Another Trump surrogate is Al Baldasaro, a former New Hampshire state lawmaker who, in 2016, got the Secret Service on his tail after threatening Hillary Clinton’s life. Collectively, these folks have been plastering YouTube, Fox News, and other media channels with messages boosting the president, and defending him from attacks.

In addition to the official campaign apparatus there is an unofficial but interconnected group called “Vets for Trump” that runs a wildly popular Facebook page and organizes “MAGA meet-ups.” (This group and its leading members have also been involved in protesting the prosecution of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.)

This unofficial group’s chief spokesperson is Thomas Speciale, who ran an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in Virginia earlier this year. Bald and brash, Speciale’s Army career included stints as a Physiological Operations Specialist and a senior Interrogator in Afghanistan. He told me he was politically activated in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. It was after this tragedy, in Speciale’s telling, that Democrats “lost their minds and went crazy about gun control.”

“What I realized at that moment was this was a psychological operation, the Democrat party has brought psychological warfare against the American people,” Speciale said. He has many more critiques of the left, from their mislabeling of gun types to their war on hate speech. He further sees Democrats as lazy, entitled socialist fascists with anti-democratic tendencies. In short, they are “the enemy.”

Speciale is bullish that Trump will pull out strong numbers with vets. He told me he’s spoken to innumerable Trump vets, and not one Biden one, in part because Veterans, like Trump, are tough, and respect the flag. “Trump’s rebuilt the military, he fired 8,000 underperforming VA employees, he’s fixed the department over all.”

Limited polling shows Trump’s historic support with veteran and military households has slipped, but remans strong. Last month, following a devastating report in The Atlantic that reported Trump calling dead soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” both YouGov and Morning Consult found Trump still held a double-digit lead over Joe Biden among those who’ve served.

In the final days of Election season, Team Trump employed a number of dubious tactics to secure veteran votes, including by holding White House events with a campaign atmosphere. Take, for instance, a trip Trump made in September to the must-win state of North Carolina, which has an incredibly high veteran population. In this journey, the president both designated a historical landmark in an old World War II battleship and also urged his supporters to vote multiple times.

A few days later, according to ProPublica, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie headlined a GOP fundraiser in the Tar Heel State State. (It should be noted that Wilkie’s soiree took place on a work day, as COVID-19 cases in VA hospitals are surging.) Then, in late October, Wilkie visited another swing state — Florida — to “thank [VA] doctors and nurses for their response to the pandemic.”

It appears as if Democrats took few, if any lessons away from their 2016 drubbing. Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, efforts to meet and pitch a veterans organizing plan to DNC Chairman Tom Perez were unsuccessful, leaving those inside the party apparatus frustrated and those outside with few resources.

In 2018, Democrats instead redeployed their “Fighting Dems” strategy from 2006 i.e. running a bunch of veteran Congressional candidates in competitive districts. When this strategy was first deployed in 2006, it flopped, with just five of the much-ballyhooed 49 veteran candidates winning their races. In 2018, out of the 38 Democratic veterans, again only five won.

During the 2020 primary campaign, a number of Democratic contenders, including Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders launched creative veteran outreach programs. The Warren campaign, for instance, imported out-of-state veterans to door-knock in neighborhoods near South Carolina military bases. The Sanders campaign, meanwhile, enlisted veteran supporters to write op-eds in their local newspapers and organize house parties.

Yet this work was greatly complicated by the Democratic party’s lack of good veteran data. One veteran staffer who worked for a Democratic primary front-runner told me data provided by the party is essentially useless, as it dates back to John Kerry’s 2004 run. “We’ve been trying to cull deceased voters from the list but as a result have not been doing the work necessary to identify my generation of veterans,” the staffer said.

Phil Giorno, who served on a Navy ship in Vietnam and today serves as a senior leader in the Florida Democratic Party, has long wanted to build permanent veteran organizing networks on the left. But the party bosses haven’t prioritized such work.

He told me that ahead of 2020, after “some obstacles,” the party agreed to put a column in its voter data file — nicknamed “ the VAN” — to note whether a voter is veteran-connected. “Still,” he huffed, “leadership hasn’t commanded people who make calls to ask the question. We need a directive or this veteran voting data will be incomplete, and random.”

Joe Biden’s team has established its own “Veterans and Military Families for Biden” policy and organizing caucus. The Biden campaign, like the RNC, hasn’t responded to my press requests in months, so its again difficult to get much insight into what they’re doing.

What we do know is Biden hired a veteran organizing director in Leo Cruz, an Army veteran whose previous political gigs include Florida spokesman for Veterans for Barack Obama. (Obama, it’s worth noting, is the only Democrat in recent memory who performed strongly with veterans in 2008, largely through his promises to end the Forever War. In 2012, after going back on his word, he lost significant ground with those who’ve served.) It appears that Biden’s main veteran policy staffer is Carlyn Reichel, who has little to no background in veteran policy.

Biden’s produced a number of compelling ads highlighting the service of his son, Beau, and detailing his work in the Senate to get armored MRAP vehicles to our gals and guys overseas in the early years of the war. There’s also an unofficial “Vets for Biden” contingent online, who’ve been recruiting volunteers to blog, meme and Tweet about Joe.

Biden’s been further helped on messaging by Lincoln Project, which brought on Fred Wellman to focus on those who’ve served. Wellman’s crafted biting TV and print ads, including ones placed strategically in military papers. Giorno pointed to Trump’s blatant disrespect of the Generals, and the Lincoln Project’s unsparing attacks, as powerful in swaying some of the hard-liners inside his American Legion post. “When trump got rid of Gen. [John] Kelly and Gen. [James] Mattis, I saw some pushback with the Marines,” he said. “I think Trump lost some support there.”

The big left vet PAC is VoteVets, which has raised a whole hell of a lot of money. What they’re doing with it beyond ads is unclear, as the organization has not responded to multiple press requests. (On Twitter, however, Chuck LaRocha, a former senior Sanders organizer, claimed that he’s worked with VoteVets to identify hundreds of thousands of veteran voters.)

There’s other progressive veteran groups like Common Defense, Vets for the People, and Vets Forward, looking to energize younger veteran voters. Common Defense’s work includes organizing veterans in labor unions, while Vets Forward is focused exclusively on tipping Arizona to the left.

This has meant staking out in neighborhoods that narrowly voted for Trump but flipped in 2018 to elect Democrat Kyrsten Sinema to the Senate. This work is tough, but could yield results. When a reporter recently followed Aaron Marquez, the co-founder of Arizona’s VetsFoward, he faced a lot of stubborn Trumpers.

One was a guy named Theodore Wynn, who called the coronavirus outbreak “a government pandemic” and said he likes Trump because “he’s just a dude that says stupid [stuff].”

“He’s not a politician. … He’s not bought and paid for,” Wynn added. Then he flashed the handgun in his pocket as evidence of the freedom he values. Marquez later told the reporter that he’d never had a weapon flashed at him in 16 years of door-knocking. “If you have 10 conversations, nine are going to suck,” the Army Reservist explained.