Mondoweiss
Clinton lost because PA, WI, and MI have high casualty rates and saw her as
pro-war, study says
Philip Weisson July 6, 201720 Comments
Hillary Clinton at a rally last year. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia
Commons
Last fall I winced whenever Hillary Clinton or her surrogates promised
regime change in Syria. Don't these people get it? Americans don't want to
be waging more wars in the Middle East.
Now an important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this
arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year's presidential election
because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.
By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey,
Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were
relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars.
The study is titled "Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the
Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?" Authors Francis Shen,
associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas
Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a
populist note:
With so much post-election analysis, it is surprising that no one has
pointed to the possibility that inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have
tipped the election. Put simply:
perhaps the small slice of America that is fighting and dying for the
nation's security is tired of its political leaders ignoring this
disproportionate burden.
Their study argues that there is a direct relationship between those states
that gained Republican votes from Romney's defeat in 2012 to Trump's win in
2016 and those states that have higher casualty rates in Middle East wars.
At Reason.com, Ed Krayewski summarizes the findings:
A new study attributes Donald Trump's victory last year to communities hit
hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters,
the authors suggest, saw Trump as an "opportunity to express that anger at
both political parties."
Krayewski summarizes the data behind the conclusion:
The study. found a "significant and meaningful relationship between a
community's rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump." The
statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and
Wisconsin had suffered "even a modestly lower casualty rate," all three
could have flipped to Hillary Clinton, making her the president. The study
controlled for party identification, comparing Trump's performance in the
communities selected to Mitt Romney's performance in 2012. It also
controlled for other relevant factors, including median family income,
college education, race, the percentage of a community that is rural, and
even how many veterans there were.
"Even after including all of these demographic control variables, the
relationship between a county's casualty rate and Trump's electoral
performance remains positive and statistically significant," the paper
noted. "Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered
a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan."
And here are the authors themselves on the moral hazard at work here. The
people who decide are not suffering as much.
America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans
seem to notice. This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct
connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from
combat. Increasingly, a divide is emerging between communities whose young
people are dying to defend the country, and those communities whose young
people are not.
Here is another powerful excerpt from the paper:
Imagine a country continuously at war for nearly two decades. Imagine that
the wars were supported by both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Continue to imagine that the country fighting these wars relied only on a
small group of citizens-a group so small that those who served in theater
constituted less than 1 percent of the nation's population, while those who
died or were wounded in battle comprised far less than 1/10th of 1 percent
of the nation's population.
And finally, imagine that these soldiers, their families, friends, and
neighbors felt that their sacrifice and needs had long been ignored by
politicians in Washington. Would voters in these hard hit communities get
angry? And would they seize an opportunity to express that anger at both
political parties? We think the answer is yes.
Kriner and Shen point out that an antiwar groundswell rocked the U.S.
political establishment 10 years before:
By 2006, the continuing deterioration of the situation in Iraq emboldened
Democrats to promise to end the war in the Middle East. That year's midterm
elections returned Democrats to power in both chambers of Congress for the
first time since before the 1994 Republican Revolution. Underlying this
sweeping change was a further erosion in support for the GOP among the
constituencies hardest hit by the war.
Their argument is obviously aimed at coastal elites, which have more power
than rural communities over decision-making, but far less to lose. The
authors are unsparing about the very different experience of war for
different communities. :
When the United States goes to war, the sacrifice that war exacts in blood
is far from uniformly distributed across the country. And in the Civil War,
Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, constituencies that have suffered the highest
casualty rates have proven most likely to punish the ruling party at the
polls.
In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for example, seven states have suffered
casualty rates of thirty or more deaths per million residents. By contrast,
four states have suffered casualty rates of fifteen or fewer deaths per
million. As a result, Americans living in these states have had different
exposure to the war's human costs through the experiences of their friends
and neighbors and local media coverage.
The four states with the lowest rates are NY, NJ, CT and Utah. All but Utah
voted Democratic. Overall, rural states have higher casualty rates, and the
authors find pretty significant inversecorrelations between state income and
education medians and casualty rates. Though it must be noted that Vermont
suffered the worst casualty rate- more than 41 deaths per million- and it is
home to the most vociferous antiwar candidate, Bernie Sanders, but was also
very safe for Clinton.
Here's Krayewski's summary again, emphasizing the policy takeaway from the
study:
The president's electoral fate in 2020 "may well rest on the
administration's approach to the human costs of war," the paper suggests.
"If Trump wants to maintain his connection to this part of his base, his
foreign policy would do well to be highly sensitive to American combat
casualties." More broadly, the authors argue that "politicians from both
parties would do well to more directly recognize and address the needs of
those communities whose young women and men are making the ultimate
sacrifice for the country."
The most effective way of addressing their needs is to advance a foreign
policy that does not see Washington as the world's policeman, that treats
U.S. military operations as a last resort, and that rethinks the foreign
policy establishment's expansive and often vague definition of national
security interests.
Thanks to Todd Pierce.