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Via John Sides comes some political science research from Jeremy Tergen examining whether past military service improves a candidate's vote share in congressional elections. The conclusion? Not really:
In general, veteran status has small effects that are not statistically distinguishable from 0. Democratic vets did better than their nonveteran peers in 2002, but did no better in 2006. That election was the year that Joe Sestak, Tammy Duckworth, and others constituted the “Fighting Dems,” a year when you would expect Democratic vets to do well, but instead Republican veterans were helped by a martial past. While the Fighting Dems may have helped the Democratic tide in 2006 by helping Democrats credibly criticize the Bush administration’s conduct of OIF (and OEF), Democratic veterans actually did a little bit worse than Democrats without a service record. This result may have occurred because Democrats were overzealous in their attempts to attract veterans as candidates, leading them to select veterans over higher quality challengers (14% of Democratic challengers were vets in 2002, compared to 28% in 2006). Republican vets running that year performed a little better than nonveteran Republican candidates, as they had been doing in the previous three elections, but the advantage just slipped above statistical significance. Overall, the effect of veteran status is very small.Meanwhile, on the presidential level, John McCain lost to Barack Obama, John Kerry lost to George W. Bush, Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton, George H.W Bush lost to Bill Clinton, George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon, Bob Kerrey and Wesley Clark never made it out of the primaries, and so on. It's hard to say that military service is a particular help in winning elections. But it's certainly a big help in attracting media coverage of your campaign -- war is color, and journalists need color -- and so that may explain the odd prominence of war hero politicians in the political debate, even as they don't win their campaigns at a particularly surprising rate. That said, I'd love to see a similar analysis to this one for other characteristics: Do law degrees help candidates? Do PhDs? Is it useful to have been a doctor? We know that women perform better than average in congressional primaries...
