In August of 1972 during the midst of the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon told then-secretary of State Henry Kissinger that “winning the election is terribly important.” As Nixon weighed the best course of action overseas, he took into consideration the presidential race back home.
Nixon, who went on to beat Democratic U.S. Senator George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, offered a glimpse into the reality of wartime politics, especially in the middle of an election year.
“I think there's a traditional conventional wisdom that politics stops at the water's edge and voters don't care that much about foreign policy, it's rarely an issue that comes up at the ballot box,” Andrew Payne, Author of War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War. “But actually, when it comes to war, when it comes to something that involves considerable human and financial costs, we find that the public does sit up and pay attention. As a result, presidents routinely take political considerations into account when they're making decisions about war and peace.”
This was the case not only for Nixon, but his predecessor, President Lyndon B. Johnson — and many other former presidents.
“History is replete with examples of this kind of behavior,” Payne told ABC15. “In Vietnam, you had Lyndon Johnson delaying crucial decisions to launch ground operations and using air power until his election was assured in 1964. More recent examples, the timing of Barack Obama's drawdown schedule in 2011 was intimately connected with his concerns about the optics of having troops in Iraq during the 2012 campaign, having campaigned for years earlier on ending that war.”
Payne notes that it’s a constant balancing act between foreign policy decisions and pursuing the best options in the national interest, while still trying to attract voters to the ballot box.
“I think when they're making decisions about military strategy, diplomatic strategy and war, there is constant balancing process,” Payne said. “What looks like in any given case varies, but the timing and nature of commitments to foreign wars can be significantly affected by the electoral process.”
For example, President George W. Bush held off on expanding military presence in Iraq until after the 2006 midterms because he feared that doing so might influence voters, according to a report from Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University — a decision he later admitted in his memoir.
That midterm resulted in the Democrats claiming power in both chambers of Congress.
The push to end the war in Iraq grew increasingly prevalent and came to the surface in the 2008 presidential election. Democrat Barrack Obama vowed to end the conflict in Iraq while his Republican challenger Sen. John McCain was a staunch supporter and argued the need to maintain a presence in the region. Obama won in a landslide.
“The timing and nature of American commitments to foreign wars, I think can definitely be affected in significant ways by the electoral process at home,” Payne said.
A study titled "Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?" by Douglas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, and Francis Shen with the University of Minnesota Law School, found that the messaging between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton regarding the war could have contributed to Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 presidential election.
“Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, we're just on a knife's edge,” Kriner told ABC15. “And so, you know, in some of the high casualty counties, our model estimates that you might have seen up to one and a half or so percent shift in the two-party vote. it's not like, you know, one county could have switched the election in that way.”
Trump’s approach resonated with rural communities who experienced high rates of casualties from military conflict.
“We saw movements away, a rejection of sort of a more aggressive and muscular foreign policy because it had largely failed to deliver on the promise of the leaders that had articulated that vision and Donald Trump comes along and says, Hey, look, this is ridiculous. America First, I'm going to stop waging stupid wars,” Payne said.
Fast-forward, and now President Joe Biden is faced with the looming threat of global unrest. There’s the Israel-Hamas War, Ukraine and Russia and the deadly drone strike that killed three American soldiers in Jordan — all in the middle of his re-election bid and a likely rematch between Trump.
“As much as you might try and keep the electoral component out of the decision-making, it becomes even harder to do because you no longer have sort of the the luxury of time,” Kriner said. “Decisions are going to have to be made, everything is in a heightened political state and everyone's trying to draw distinctions between them and sort of to turn these issues to political advantages.”
