The Third Way project, a centrist Democratic policy outfit, has just released an interesting survey on public attitudes going in to the 2016 election. They make two arguments that I think are worth exploring, (1) the foreign policy advantage Democrats briefly enjoyed in the wake of the Iraq War has dissipated and (2) foreign policy may be more salient in this election than in the recent past. My general take is that foreign policy, barring a crisis, isn’t a big driver of voter decisions in presidential elections. That said, it could be an important issue for a more significant segment of the electorate than in past elections. That could matter on the margins in a close election. I’ll come back to this at the end of this post.As for the partisan gap on national security, the folks at Third Way identified a paradox in their survey findings:
Most importantly, our survey revealed a paradox that may be at the heart of the Democratic Party’s national security problem. While voters overwhelmingly favored Republicans on national security, they viewed Democrats as much more like themselves on national security.
My wife Bethany Albertson just released a book with Shana Gadarian, Anxious Politics, which I think offers a ready explanation for the somewhat curious patterns observed in the survey. An emotionally anxious electorate will turn to the party that offers “protective policies” that they perceive will keep the country safe. If a particular party seems to own an issue area, they are able to generate support from folks who normally wouldn’t agree with them, even when the party’s preferences may be further from their own. Republicans in this case have had a traditional dominance on national security that deteriorated in the wake of the Iraq War but which has seen new life in the wake of the resurgence of ISIS.
This helps us understand the graphic that I embedded above from Third Way where voters are closer to the Democrats on policy but seem to trust the Republicans more on national security. As the graphic below suggests, Republicans not surprisingly think their party is best equipped to handle national security. More importantly, Independents currently think Republicans do a better job on national security than Democrats.
Source: Third Way
I think the resurgent sense of fear and concern about national security is bound up almost though not exclusively with anxiety about ISIS and terrorism, though Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the Ebola crisis may also be relevant. The 2014 Chicago Council survey found strong support for counter-terrorism measures (drone strikes, targeted assassinations, air strikes), despite a reluctance to deploy US ground troops abroad. The recent 2015 Chicago Council survey found a slight increase in support for those measures. Consistent with rising anxiety about terrorism, the survey found a spike in concern in about “Islamic fundamentalism” across the electorate (see graphic below).
The 2016 election is still more than a year away, and a lot can happen in the interim. Moreover, it is still unclear how salient foreign policy will be next time. The conventional wisdom is that outside of crisis years that foreign policy doesn’t matter a whole hell of lot in elections, though nominees (and their VPs) still have to pass a test of being perceived as credible commanders in chief.
Is this actually going to be a foreign policy election? I’m not convinced it will be. Part of the results may be an artifact of giving survey respondents a fixed list of concerns, including national security. I’d be curious what people say if they are given an open-ended question about what their top concerns are. I’d also be curious to know when they say national security, what are they really worried about. My guess is terrorism and ISIS almost exclusively, but I wonder if pushed, the electorate might blanch if they knew that Republicans plans for addressing ISIS and instability in the Middle East mean restoring ground troops to Iraq and potential war with Iran.
It certainly behooves GOP candidates in the primary to talk up foreign policy since it’s the most important issue for a 1/3 of those in the Third Way survey:
35% of Republicans, 21% of Independents, and 17% of Democrats listed national security as the most important issue. Independents chose it more than twice as often as any issue except the economy.
If the situation in the Middle East deteriorates further or there is some significant terrorist attack between now and the 2016, then national security might become more salient. Moreover, if the economy continues to grow and generate jobs, Republicans may find it difficult to criticize Democrats on their domestic job performance, making it more attractiveness to elevate national security concerns to the fore. Whether Americans will care in sufficient numbers is another story.
The critical empirical questions here are (1) What proportion of voters who identify foreign policy as a top concern are wobbly and could vote Republican? and (2) Are there enough of them located in swing states to tilt the balance in favor of the Republicans? Perhaps some enterprising American politics folks or Nate Silver can take that data challenge on.
In the meantime, I’d be curious to see what effect the migration crisis in Europe is having on Americans’ attitudes about their sense of safety and whether Americans’ attitudes to immigration are changing at all in the face of the migrant crisis over there. It could be that it is so far away that most people aren’t making a connection, but I fear that a segment of the electorate may be uneasy generally and make wild connections between instability of porous borders over there and the domestic scene here. That, for now, is conjecture.
For Democrats, the challenge if these results hold up, both on the partisan gap and salience, is fashioning a coherent narrative for why Democrats offer better solutions to the problem, when it is not obvious what the right strategy is to defeat ISIS and shore up failing states in the Middle East.
Given the graphic you put up at the top of your post, which shows voters as more isolationist than *either* party, Third Way has a rather…eccentric interpretation of the data.
In terms of defense as the “most important issue” this is not a big change in terms of exit polls:
2006 40%
2008 9%
2010 8%
2012 5%
2014 13%
The 2014 exit poll is still low and it’s hard to say it’s an outlier over the last 4 cycles. Comparing the 2015 survey responses to 2014 exit polls seems problematic.
Like so much of Washington, the report exhibits an obsession with independents. Yanna Krupnikov and Samantha Klar have a forthcoming book arguing that there actually are very few “independents” in American politics. Self-identified “independents” are usually Republican leaners who do not like to tell me people (or themselves) they are Republicans but almost always vote that way. That independents are more hawkish should therefore not be surprising.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/11/06/independents-didnt-decide-the-midterm-election/
Jon,
Great points. The way they asked the question about intervention is interesting and I’m glad that they don’t claim that this is the scale that captures internationalism but rather interventionism, though the deck might be loaded a bit by the way they ask the question.
“Interventionists believe in a foreign policy where the U.S. often gets involved in the affairs of other countries and uses the military to protect U.S. interests, attack
terrorists, defend democracy, or stop humanitarian crises. Isolationists believe in a foreign policy where the U.S. rarely intervenes in the affairs of other countries and rarely uses military force, focusing more on affairs at home.”
I didn’t see a breakdown of Independents on this question so it could be that Independents care about FP more than Dems, trust R’s more than D’s but they might not be super keen on intervention. I’ll see if I can find out.
I would say that you are right on the exit polls. I guess the question is whether it will be higher in 2016 than it was in 2014 and would that matter in a close election. My gut says no way it’s 2006 levels, but 2014 or a shade higher isn’t unrealistic, but a year plus is a long time in politics.
You raise the issue of whether or not the “independents” are really independents after all. The way they coded the question allows for strong and weak partisans and then Independents that lean Democratic or lean Republican for a total of six categories. They also have Independents in their own right, which account for about 30% of the sample. Each of the other six categories comprise about 10%. So, are those “Independents” truly Independent. They probably lean one way or the other, but I doubt they will all break R since that would be a 60-40 split towards the Republicans.
Great question Jon, and great response Josh. I’m the author of the Third Way report, and would be happy to clarify a few things.
First, our salience question was a fixed-list, like the exit polls we compare it to. Given the different samples, timing, etc… our salience question is not perfectly comparable to the exit polls, but we feel it’s a viable proxy.
Second, Josh’s hypothesis about Independents is exactly right – they care about national security far more than Democrats, they trust R’s much more than D’s (22% more), and less interventionist than either group of partisans (a 5.5 of on our scale).
Finally, predicting salience a year from now is incredibly challenging. The trend is to higher salience for national security, but that could certainly change as Josh says. The overall point we’re trying to make is that national security rarely rivals the salience of the economy, but because Democrats are so woefully behind on the issue, it can cost them elections even when its salience is considerably lower than the economy (especially because the partisan gap on the economy is very small).
Jon, further follow up. The folks at the Third Way shared with me more data. Independents on the Intervention scale averaged 5.5, which was closer to non-intervention than even Democrats (4.9) or Republicans (4.0). So, you have those folks even less inclined to support intervention but also more likely to be worried about national security than Dems and to back Republicans on national security than Dems.
Jon,
Based on the Chicago Council Survey data I’ve worked with, I’d agree with Krupnikov and Klar on partisan-leaning independents as far as foreign policy issues go. In fact, in our 2015 data, Republicans leaners tended to respond more like strong Republicans than weak Republicans. But I’d be very surprised if the remaining independents were *more* hawkish. In our data they were more interested in staying out of world affairs than other groups, generally less interested in international-affairs news, and less likely to describe a variety of threats as critical threats to US vital interests.
In some ways this meshes with the Third Way findings. However, I think our results on political engagement muddy the implications for the 2016 election: non-leaning Independents were far less likely to report being registered to vote and far less likely to say they planned to vote in the next election.
…Craig