A one-party system: Senate Democrats and military spending
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°29 | 24 July 2020
I tallied the votes of each Senate Democrat on 1) Senator Sanders’ amendment that would have reduced military spending by (only) 10 percent and 2) the Senate version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I then compared these votes with the campaign contributions each Senate Democrat accepted from the defense industry (data via OpenSecrets, 2015 to so far in 2020).
Note: A full report (deeper analysis and complete data set for all Democratic members of Congress) will be out next week through SPRI, your favorite (perhaps by default) leftist, grassroots-funded foreign policy think tank. In the meantime, please check out our previous publications and consider supporting us if you can spare a few dollars per month. Thank you!
Central finding: war profiteers largely get what they pay for
Senate Democrats who voted didn’t fail us — meaning they voted for Sanders’ amendment and voted against the NDAA — accepted considerably less campaign financing from defense contractors than those who voted to entrench/expand the (brutal) status quo:

Put in a different way: based on these votes, the more money a Senate Democrat takes from the defense industry, the higher the probability that they’ll vote how the defense industry wants them to vote (so the same dynamic observed with House Democrats).
Misc. notes
The Senate Democrats who didn’t fail us (again, meaning they supported Sanders’ amendment and opposed the NDAA): Booker, Gillibrand, Leahy, Markey, Merkley, Sanders (counted him as a Democrat and not as an Independent), Warren, Wyden.
The Senate Democrats who did fail us: Everyone besides those eight people.
Surveyed voters supported the idea of reducing the military budget by 10 percent, 56 to 27 percent (via Data for Progress).
Outro
Stay tuned for the full report (with a comprehensive data set and accompanying visuals) from SPRI, due out sometime next week.
Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)