Military bases swung hard away from Republicans in 2020

ALLEGATIONS OF FRAUD can seldom be stood up by mere insinuation of fishiness. But with scant evidence, one Republican Party poll-watcher in Detroit fell back on that in 2020. In a notarised statement presented by the Trump campaign, the onlooker noted that most of the military ballots he “saw were straight ticket Democrat or simply had Joe Biden’s name filled in on them”. “I had always been told that military personnel tended to be more conservative, so this stuck out to me as the day went on,” he added. Although military voters and their families do tilt conservative (see chart), there is little evidence that they are a Republican constituency. In fact, analysis by The Economist suggests that Mr Trump performed far worse in 2020 across precincts that map onto military bases than he did four years earlier.