Running on Iraq or Running from Iraq? Conditional Issue Ownership in the 2006 Midterm Elections

• Published date: 01 June 2009
• Author: Peter F. Trumbore,David A. Dulio
• Date: 01 June 2009
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912908320670
• Subject Matter: Articles

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June 2009 230-243

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Running on Iraq or Running from Iraq?

Conditional Issue Ownership in the 2006 Midterm Elections

David A. Dulio

Peter F. Trumbore

Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

The authors examine the role of Iraq as a campaign issue in the 2006 midterm elections, analyzing more than 400

television advertisements produced by ninety-four candidates in forty-seven competitive races for the U.S. House of

Representatives. Generally, the authors find that the issue of the war was not as central an element of candidate

appeals as the conventional wisdom and media storyline leading up to Election Day implied. On the issue of Iraq, as

well as other issues central to 2006, the authors find evidence that challengers pursued different issue strategies than

either incumbents or open-seat candidates of the same party.

Keywords: issue ownership; congressional elections; campaigns; foreign policy; Iraq

In the months leading up to Election Day, the 2006

midterms were widely perceived in the media to be

a referendum on foreign policy, with the Iraq war

front and center. And the outcome of the election,

with power shifting to the Democrats in both the

House of Representatives and the Senate, appeared to

confirm the storyline that the media had been for-

warding since late 2005. The day after the election, a

front-page New York Times report declared that the

outcome of the vote had put “a proudly unyielding

president on notice that voters want change, espe-

cially on the war in Iraq” (Toner 2006, A1). This con-

clusion was repeated in early 2007, with the Times

attributing the Democrats’ return to power in the

Congress to public discontent with the war (Toner

2007, A6). Indeed, even though it was vetoed by

President Bush, the passage of an emergency supple-

mental appropriations bill in early 2007 in both the

House and the Senate for the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan with withdrawal timetables included

was billed as the Democrats’ following through on

one of their most important campaign promises. Said

House Appropriations Committee Member James P.

Moran Jr. (D-VA), “We were on the right side of the

national referendum last November. We have a man-

date to bring our troops home as soon and as safely as

possible. If we can’t accomplish that, we will have let

down the people who worked so hard for a

Democratic majority” (Abramowitz 2007, A6).

For the Iraq war to have been the issue that

brought the Democrats back into power, at least two

dynamics had to have been in place: (1) voters had to

have had the war on their minds and wanted the sta-

tus quo changed, and (2) candidates had to be talking

about it in a way that connected with voters. The

assumption that the outcome of the 2006 election

turned on the issue of Iraq has been convincingly

argued in Jacobson’s (2007) study showing that

assessments of the war were central to individual vot-

ers’ decisions.1This finding is particularly notewor-

thy given that conventional wisdom holds that

congressional elections are typically driven by local

rather than national issues and rarely if ever by foreign

policy questions (Friedenberg 1997). As Herrnson

(2004) found from his study of the 1998 and 2002

midterms, candidates in those cycles viewed local

issues to be more important than those tied to defense

or foreign policy.

While there is a long, rich tradition of scholarship on

the impact of foreign policy on presidential elections,2

the question of the role of foreign policy concerns in

David A. Dulio, Associate Professor of Political Science,

Oakland University; e-mail: ddulio@oakland.edu.

Peter F. Trumbore, Associate Professor of Political Science,

Oakland University; e-mail: ptrumbor@oakland.edu.

Authors’Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at

the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, April

12-15, 2007, Chicago. We are grateful to Roger Larocca for his

helpful guidance and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful

comments and critiques of earlier versions of the article. Any

remaining errors are the authors’ alone. A replication data set is

available from the authors on request.