Justin Logan
Justin Logan
If there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, there can be a lot of BS in a poll. Although campaign veterans and political scientists have learned a lot about polling, many of those conducting polls, and certainly those publicizing their results, either don’t know or don’t care about polls’ limitations. Polls can contain truth, but they can also contain—or be used as—propaganda.
You don’t want to take poll caution all the way to poll nihilism, though. Take President Joe Biden, for example. In May, he pushed back against a CNN anchor who had asked about his consistently bad poll performances. His response? “The polling data has been wrong all along.” The polls won.
Or in 2012, a conservative activist founded a website called Unskewed Polls that asserted Mitt Romney actually was beating Barack Obama handily once you… well, unskewed the polls. When Obama trounced Romney, the activist protested that he had been right and that Obama won by committing “massive voter fraud in the key swing states.”
So with all that as prologue, here are a few comments on the recent poll Cato conducted under Emily Ekins’ stewardship. The defense and foreign policy studies group drew up a number of questions on foreign policy issues and surveyed voters in each of the likely vital swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. I wanted to point to three themes I identified in the poll.
First, casualty aversion. Our colleague John Mueller recently reprised his decades-old and pioneering argument that US support for war declines as US casualties increase. In his recent paper, Mueller argued that the GWOT was an aberration from that norm but we have returned to casualty aversion. (GWOT: Global War on Terrorism.) This poll supports that claim in the context of Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
For example, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/three-themes-catos-swing-state-foreign-policy-poll