To Change or Not to Change Horses: The World War II Elections

It is not best to swap horses when crossing streams. --Abraham Lincoln (New York Times 1864) Seeing it through in Vietnam cost me 20 points in the polls. --Lyndon Johnson, 1968 (Mueller 1973, 196) "Wartime election" sounds like an oxymoron. Many countries do not give voters the opportunity to vote under wartime conditions. Even an established democracy like Britain suspended elections during both world wars. Wartime conditions impose unique constraints on the general public, just like on the economy, that are absent in peacetime. So when elections are being held in wartime, as has been the case in the United States throughout its history, voters may be expected to follow a different calculus than in peacetime. As Lincoln's admonition suggests, voters would not be wise to change leaders in the middle of a war. Going to war is expected to generate a "rally 'round the flag" effect. Faced with an external enemy, the adversaries of domestic politics suspend their disputes and close ranks behind the country's leader, designated by the U.S. Constitution as commander in chief of the armed forces. It would seem unpatriotic for citizens safely out of harm's way not to do so. Yet in recent years, politics has not stopped at the water's edge. The party that got the United States into war has not fared especially well at the polls. To wit, Republicans lost the White House in 2008, as well as the Congress two years earlier, in large part because of voter discontent with the war in Iraq. A generation or so earlier, Lyndon Johnson saw his popularity decline and his party lose the White House in the 1968 election amidst widespread opposition to the war in Vietnam. To observers with even longer memory, this recalled the fate of Harry Truman during the Korean War and the Democrats' loss of the White House in the 1952 election. Is the folk wisdom cited by Abraham Lincoln mistaken about wartime voting? This article examines the first wartime elections in the age of survey research. The data come from an October 1940 Gallup poll and a 1944 election study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Technically, of course, the United States was not at war in 1940, but war in Europe, as well as Asia, loomed large as an issue in American politics then. Both of those surveys have languished in undeserved obscurity. Note that they picked Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) as the winner in the respective elections with uncanny accuracy, avoiding the pitfalls of the notorious 1948 election. Each of these surveys offered respondents a counterfactual choice touching on the wartime aspect of those elections: What if there was no war, whom would you vote for (have voted for)? The surveys also queried respondents about war-related policies and FDR's handling of the war. To complement the survey evidence, a time series analysis of the vote in presidential elections is conducted to determine how the White House party fares in wartime elections throughout American history, and especially during World War II. Political Behavior in Wartime Folk wisdom aside, the key rationale for voter reluctance to change leaders in wartime is the "rally 'round the flag" phenomenon (Mueller 1973). Military interventions form the top tier of rally events, defined by Mueller as an event that "(1) is international and (2) involves the United States and particularly the president directly; and it must be (3) specific, dramatic, and sharply focused" (1973, 209). (1) A wealth of studies has probed the surge in leader approval in the wake of rally events (Callaghan and Virtanen 1993; Edwards and Swenson 1997; Kernell 1978; Lai and Reiter 2005; MacKuen 1983; Nickelsburg and Norpoth 2000; Ostrom and Simon 1985). Not all rally events, to be sure, pack an equal punch (Lian and Oneal 1993). It takes front-page coverage in the New York Times for an event to generate substantial gains in presidential approval (Oneal and Bryan 1995). …