As the nation prepares to honor its veterans, the author provides a profile of veterans in America and how they vote.

Senior Fellow Karlyn Bowman

Seventy years ago, Armistice Day became a national holiday, and in 1954, President Eisenhower changed the holiday's name to Veterans' Day. As we prepare to celebrate veterans' service on Tuesday, the military is the most positively regarded institution in American life. According to public opinion surveys, young and old, black and white, rich and poor all regard the institution highly.

There are nearly 24 million military veterans in the United States. When ABC ace polling analyst Gary Langer took a close look at the demographic this summer, he reported that, among registered voters, veterans were older on average than nonveterans by about 11 years. They were twice as likely to be senior citizens as nonveterans. Another distinctive feature of the population: 91 percent are men.

In the Census' post-election survey in 2004, 74 percent of veterans reported voting compared to 63 percent of nonveterans. That year, and again this year, the exit poll consortium asked voters leaving the polls whether they had ever served in the military. Eighteen percent in 2004 checked a box indicating they had. In that election, veterans voted 57 percent for George Bush to 41 percent for John Kerry.

So it's no surprise that on Election Day this year, self-identified veterans supported their fellow comrade-in-arms. But they did so by a narrower margin, 54 percent to 45 percent. Still, they were one of John McCain's best demographics. Sixteen percent of all voters this year were veterans.

What about those who are serving today? Active duty military personnel, as one might expect, are very hard to poll. The Military Times recently conducted a voluntary survey of them, reservists and retirees. It wasn't random, so we should be careful about attributing attitudes reflected in the results to the entire military population. The newspaper contacted about 70,000 current and former subscribers to the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force Times who gave the papers their e-mail addresses.

In the poll, which ran from September 22 to 29, more than 2,800 active duty members, 1,400 members of the National Guard or reserves and 4,400 retirees participated through a secure Internet site. The self-selected sample, however, was older than the military as a whole, and it contained a higher percentage of officers than the military does.

Keeping those facts in mind, the Military Times reported that all three groups supported McCain over Barack Obama by significant margins. In the survey, Iraq ranked third as a top issue--behind the character of the candidate and the economy.

An army officer with the 10th Mountain Division, Jason Dempsey, has studied the survey carefully. Writing in The New Republic in October, Dempsey, while lauding the Military Times' work, said that military politics are "more complex" than one might assume and the Military Times poll suggests.

His own survey, conducted in 2004 with the distinguished social scientist Robert Shapiro at Columbia, was the first to sample Army-enlisted personnel and junior and senior officers randomly. It found that while the better-educated upper echelons of the military lean heavily conservative, enlisted personnel look much more like the population as a whole.

About a third of the military members in his survey considered themselves conservative, 45 percent moderates and 23 percent liberal. On Election Day this year, the self-reported identifications of voters mirrored those results almost perfectly: 34 percent called themselves conservative, 44 percent moderate and 22 percent liberal. Dempsey analyzes these results and others in his forthcoming book, Our Army: Soldiers, Politics and American Civil-Military Relations (Princeton University Press, 2009).

This year, with attention to the Iraq war waning, the military vote didn't get as much attention nationally as it has in the past. But for McCain, Sarah Palin and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden--and the millions of other Americans who have sons and daughters in the military or reserves--this election defined their children's fates. Their voices deserve to be heard.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at AEI.