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Battlefield Casualties and Ballot-Box Defeat: Did the Bush–Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2020

Douglas L. Kriner Open the ORCID record for Douglas L. Kriner [Opens in a new window]  and
Francis X. Shen Open the ORCID record for Francis X. Shen [Opens in a new window]
Douglas L. Kriner
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Francis X. Shen
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Abstract

In the 2016 election, foreign policy may have played a critically important role in swinging an important constituency to Donald Trump: voters in high-casualty communities that had abandoned Republican candidates in the mid-2000s. Trump’s iconoclastic campaign rhetoric promised a foreign policy that would simultaneously be more muscular and restrained. He promised to rebuild and refocus the military while avoiding the “stupid wars” and costly entanglements of his predecessors. At both the state and county levels, we find significant and substantively meaningful relationships between local casualty rates and support for Trump. Trump made significant electoral gains among constituencies that were exhausted and politically alienated by 18 years of fighting. Trump’s foreign policy shows a president beset by competing militaristic and isolationist impulses. Our results suggest that giving into the former may come at a significant electoral cost.

Type
Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 248 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

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