Iraq Casualties and the 2006 Senate Elections

• Date: 01 November 2007
• Published date: 01 November 2007
• Author: DOUGLAS L. KRINER,FRANCIS X. SHEN
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3162/036298007782398486

507Iraq Casualties and Senate Elections

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXII, 4, November 2007 507

DOUGLAS L. KRINER

Boston University

FRANCIS X. SHEN

Harvard University

Iraq Casualties and the

2006 Senate Elections

Prior scholarship on the effects of war casualties on U.S. elections has focused

on large-scale conflicts. For this article, we examined whether or not the much-smaller

casualty totals incurred in Iraq had a similar influence on the 2006 Senate contests.

We found that the change in vote share from 2000 to 2006 for Republican Senate

candidates at both the state and county level was significantly and negatively related

to local casualty tallies and rates. These results provide compelling evidence for the

existence of a democratic brake on military adventurism, even in small-scale wars,

but one that is strongest in communities that have disproportionately shouldered a

war’s costs.

In the immediate aftermath of the Democrats’ sweeping victory

in the 2006 midterm elections, many political pundits—like modern-

day augurs divining auspices from exit-polling data—were quick to

pronounce the elections a resounding referendum on the Bush

administration’s conduct of military operations in Iraq. While the Iraq

war’s electoral consequences appear obvious to mainstream news

outlets, a fervent debate continues among political scientists about

whether or not foreign affairs—even major wars—have significant

effects on federal elections (Aldrich, Sullivan, and Borgida 1989; Gelpi,

Reifler, and Feaver 2007; Hess and Nelson 1985; Nincic and Hinckley

1991).

This debate is particularly important to revisit within the context

of the current Iraq war because this conflict has involved considerably

smaller casualty totals than other major American wars. Scholarship

to date on the relationship between war casualties and congressional

electoral fates rests on data from the Civil War and Vietnam (Carson

et al. 2001; Gartner, Segura, and Barratt 2004). Yet Vietnam involved

17 times more casualties than Iraq, and the Civil War an astounding

170 times the Iraq tally.1 Both the Civil War and Vietnam also involved

508 Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen

conscription and significant draft resistance escalating to violence

(Foley 2003; Schecter 2005). The relatively low number of casualties

sustained in Iraq, coupled with the absence of large-scale resistance

on par with the draft riots of earlier eras, raises questions about scale.

Does a threshold exist below which casualties will not affect senators’

electoral fates? Has the casualty count in Iraq reached that threshold?

We confront both questions in this article.

In addition to Iraq’s critical importance in the off-year elections,

the 2006 midterms were also marked by an unusually high percentage

of Americans responding that national, not local concerns were the

motive forces behind their congressional votes. The growing national-

ization of congressional elections since Tip O’Neil coined his apho-

rism “all politics are local” is well documented (Brady, Cogan, and

Fiorina 2000; Jacobson 2004). For this study, however, we investi-

gated the possibility that even the most national of issues—the war in

Iraq—may have a strong local component. Previous studies have

demonstrated the influence of local casualties on public opinion

(Gartner and Segura 1998; Gartner, Segura, and Wilkening 1997), but

there is scant evidence that local casualties at lower levels of aggrega-

tion than the state or congressional district influence electoral outcomes.

We correct this deficit by exploring how the Iraq war’s influence on

voting returns was critically mediated by local casualty rates at both

the state and county levels.

We begin our discussion by examining the influence of a state’s

share of Iraq casualties on the change in that state’s Republican sena-

torial vote share from the 2000 to the 2006 elections.2 We then shift to

the county level, where there is considerably greater variance in wartime

experiences, to examine the relationship between local casualties and

changes in Republican electoral fortunes at a lower level of geographic

aggregation. Finally, we narrow our focus to the effect of local casualties

on the 14 Republican incumbent senators seeking reelection in 2006,

all but two of whom voted to authorize military action against Iraq in

2002.3 We show that Republican senatorial candidates lost ground from

their 2000 performance in states and counties hit hard by the war in

Iraq but generally fared no worse in states and counties that had thus

far emerged from the war relatively unscathed. Our findings suggest a

remarkable degree of casualty sensitivity among the American elec-

torate. The historically modest number of casualties suffered in the

Iraq war has not spurred riots in the streets, but it has produced signifi-

cant negative reactions in the voting booth.