Last week’s Democratic convention drew endorsements for presidential candidate Joe Biden from former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and high-ranking retired military officers. And this week’s Republican convention included a speech from Vice President Pence’s national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. Other retired military officers have not given explicit endorsements but have stepped into the public discussion: retired Adm. William McRaven published an op-ed criticizing the Trump administration’s stance against mail-in voting; and tweets by retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman called out the administration for “four years of division and hate.”
Although retired military endorsements have become common in presidential electoral cycles, this year’s endorsements may prove different for a variety of reasons. The endorsements arrive during a contentious election season, and after a summer of controversy. Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew criticism for appearing in uniform during a White House response to the protests over the killing of George Floyd. And the Black Lives Matter protests drew the Pentagon into the debate over whether to rename military installations named after former Confederate military officers.
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Although the U.S. military is a political institution, there is a well-established norm that retired military officers try to avoid direct involvement in partisan politics, even though involvement in partisan politics is broadly legal. These recent events have once again brought that norm into the spotlight.
Here are three things to know about the trend of retired military leaders making partisan political endorsements.
1. Retired military endorsements have increased over time.
Political endorsements from prominent retired military figures have not always been a regular feature of elections. The first major military endorsement in the modern period came with former Marine Corps commandant P.X. Kelley’s appearance in a television ad during George H.W. Bush’s 1992 campaign and retired Adm. William Crowe’s subsequent endorsement of Bill Clinton.
Since then, military endorsements have increased in frequency, widely favoring Republicans until 2016. Retired service members featured prominently on both sides of the 2004 election, incorporating Sen. John F. Kerry’s Vietnam War service into the race. In 2008, Barack Obama touted his endorsements from former Joint Chiefs chairman and Vietnam veteran Colin L. Powell and a handful of others, while Sen. John McCain — who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, countered with more than 300 military endorsements — including Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Four years later, 500 retired generals and admirals issued a bloc endorsement of Mitt Romney in the Washington Times.
The practice of retired military endorsements reached a zenith in 2016. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton touted their own retired military endorsements, and those statements of support were highly publicized. Speaking at the party nomination conventions, retired generals John R. Allen and Michael Flynn drew sharp condemnation from many, including Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the recently retired Joint Chiefs chairman.
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Given the criticism they often face, why do retired military figures endorse political candidates? Recent analysis of more than 1,340 retired officer endorsements between 2004 and 2016 by Zachary Griffiths and Olivia Simon revealed that these statements of support appear to result when fellow military peers ask for support, rather than because of a retired officer’s partisan preferences.
2. These endorsements don’t appear to significantly help candidates.
Despite the increase in these endorsements in recent presidential elections, do they actually have much of an effect on public support for candidates? Research conducted in the run-up to the 2012 election by Jim Golby, Kyle Dropp and Peter Feaver suggests that military endorsements may not actually influence support for candidates among established partisans. Even among independents, the influence was modest.
So why do these endorsements get such attention? Campaigns have increasingly sought the stamp of military approval that such testimonials provide. These endorsements may be useful to those candidates who seek to bolster their credentials on national security issues. But the high esteem the military enjoys with the public makes association with the military potentially useful even for candidates with established foreign policy or military experience like Kerry or McCain.
3. Endorsements may lead to greater politicization of the military.
The United States has long seen norms against the politicization of the military as necessary criteria for a stable democracy and functional civil-military relations, as Carrie Lee has explained here at TMC. Research has shown that endorsements may affect the public’s perception of the military itself — here’s how.
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First, endorsements could reduce public confidence in the military as an institution. Experimental research conducted in 2018 by Michael Robinson found that the public significantly downgrades their estimation of retired officers who engage in endorsements or punditry for partisan candidates, believing both individual endorsers on the other side of the partisan spectrum and the military institution to be less trustworthy or qualified.
A second challenge is that active-duty troops may follow the example set by the highly visible endorsements of retired senior officers and participate in politics more actively, further altering perceptions of the military as nonpartisan. Heidi Urben found this to be the case in her 2017 study of military social media use. In her survey of military elites, nearly 44.5 percent reported military members discussing politics on social media — and more than 78 percent either liking, retweeting or posting about political topics.
A third point is that retired military endorsements during the 2020 campaign season enter a highly politicized environment, making such endorsement more contentious than during previous elections. While public confidence in the military is often high in the aggregate, it is deeply split along partisan lines. A YouGov/Economist poll in June, in the wake of the deployment of active-duty troops to Washington, D.C., during the George Floyd protests, revealed one of the widest partisan gaps in years between Democrats and Republicans (24 percentage points) on whether respondents had a “great deal” or “some” military confidence.
This polarized environment may make retired military endorsements more likely to politicize the institution, yet retired military endorsements appear to be here to stay. Although research suggests that this advocacy may lower public confidence in the military on its own, these retiree endorsements come during a week where even active rank-and-file service members found themselves drawn into controversy for both the Democratic and Republican conventions.
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Zachary E. Griffiths (@z_e_griffiths) is an Army officer and former assistant professor of American politics at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He earned his MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2017.
Michael A. Robinson (@m_robinson771) is an assistant professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and an active-duty Army strategist. He holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University where his research focused on civil-military relations and partisan polarization.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of Defense or any part of the U.S. government.
