If there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, there can be a lot of BS in a poll. Although campaign veterans and political scientists have learned a lot about polling, many of those conducting polls, and certainly those publicizing their results, either don’t know or don’t care about polls’ limitations. Polls can contain truth, but they can also contain—or be used as—propaganda.
You don’t want to take poll caution all the way to poll nihilism, though. Take President Joe Biden, for example. In May, he pushed back against a CNN anchor who had asked about his consistently bad poll performances. His response? “The polling data has been wrong all along.” The polls won.
Or in 2012, a conservative activist founded a website called Unskewed Polls that asserted Mitt Romney actually was beating Barack Obama handily once you… well, unskewed the polls. When Obama trounced Romney, the activist protested that he had been right and that Obama won by committing “massive voter fraud in the key swing states.”
So with all that as prologue, here are a few comments on the recent poll Cato conducted under Emily Ekins’ stewardship. The defense and foreign policy studies group drew up a number of questions on foreign policy issues and surveyed voters in each of the likely vital swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. I wanted to point to three themes I identified in the poll.
First, casualty aversion. Our colleague John Mueller recently reprised his decades-old and pioneering argument that US support for war declines as US casualties increase. In his recent paper, Mueller argued that the GWOT was an aberration from that norm but we have returned to casualty aversion. (GWOT: Global War on Terrorism.) This poll supports that claim in the context of Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
For example, respondents supported “sending money and weapons to Ukraine.” As shown below, however, if asked whether they supported doing so “even if it risked going to war with Russia,” support sank significantly.
Much the same can be found in terms of a prospective Israel-Iran war. Sending money and guns to support Israel won far more support than did having the United States enter such a war itself.
Of note: A Chicago Council poll in August (after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran) that asked whether respondents “would favor the use of US troops if Israel were attacked by its neighbors” saw numbers slightly less opposed to a US-Iran war, but still notably low: 42 percent would support US entry into such a war, whereas 56 percent would oppose.
But perhaps the most striking finding on this score concerned Taiwan. China is supposed to be the organizing principle of US defense policy, and there is profound support in Washington for defending Taiwan from Chinese predation. When asked what the United States should do if China were to invade Taiwan, Americans were willing to sanction or send aid, but only 8–9% said the United States should go to war with China to defend it. By contrast, 26–32% of respondents said the United States should “not get involved.”
Overall, Americans appear willing to throw lawyers, guns, and money at overseas problems, but are very wary of spilling American blood trying to remedy them.
This leads to the second theme I saw in the poll: an Iraq syndrome. In a Gallup poll earlier this year, I noticed that when asked an open-ended question about which country was our “greatest enemy today,” 5 percent had volunteered “the United States itself.” With that in mind, we asked respondents which countries posed a threat to US national security. Allowed to choose several options, 28–37% of respondents selected “the United States itself.” Pressed further about which of their threats posed the greatest threat to US national security, between 11–17% identified “the United States itself,” more than those who selected North Korea or Iran.
Of course, the finding raises the question of why voters see the United States itself as a threat to US national security. Here we have to allow an array of ideas: remorse about US adventures overseas; antipathy toward the opposing political party; Democrats seeing a threat to democracy and Republicans perceiving another Flight 93 election, and so on. But there is unquestionably a sense among many voters that America’s problems are coming from inside the house.
A sense of frustration clearly extends to US policy in the Middle East. When asked whether Washington could fix the problems happening in the Middle East if Americans devoted “more money, soldiers, and resources to conflicts” in that region, the results were absolutely dismal.
Similarly, asked whether our involvement in conflicts in the Middle East had done more to improve or worsen US national security, the responses were… not close.
The final theme, and here I’m saying what I always say, is the low salience of foreign policy. Asked to name their top three issues from a list of 17 possible, “foreign policy and national security” came in 9th, 10th, and 12th, respectively. Foreign policy in the United States is like polo—an elite sport. To change it, changing the elite will have more effect than trying to change mass opinion.
(Thank you to Ben Giltner, who created the charts for this blog.)