National Security and the 2008 Election Posted by Patrick Barry

Today NSN hosted its monthly member lunch. I don't always make it to these things, but the allure of both free staff lunches (provided by Taylor Gourmet) and guest speaker Matt Yglesias made this event hard to resist.  Matt stunned the wonk crowd with his dazzling, sophisticated grasp of power point, making some insightful observations about foreign policy, domestic politics, new media, and the intersection of all three.  Lunch was good too.

Matt said something that I hadn't heard before on how national security issues played out in the 2008 election. He began with the observation that Obama performed worse against McCain in 2008 than John Kerry did against Bush in 2004 on the core national security issues of Iraq and terrorism - a fact that seems to indicate that progressives lost ground on national security issues. (To this I would make some small caveat, which is that the McCain-Obama match-up doesn't really reflect the broader comparison between progressives and conservatives on national security, since McCain is a war hero, and Obama at 47 is an unusually young Presidential candidate.)  Anyway, moving on.

Matt's main point was on the significance in 2008 of security as a threshold test of broader competency and fitness for the Presidency. Here the exit polling tells an interesting story (see accompanying visual aid from Matt's power point.) You can basically brake this chart down into three distinct groups:

Group A
Of the total number of voters polled, 32% thought only Obama had the right experience to be president. We'll call this "Group A." Among this group, Obama beat McCain 98% to 1%, and it's pretty safe to assume that the group largely tracks with Obama's base.

Group B
40% of total voters surveyed found that only McCain had the right experience, a group we shall call "Group B." McCain won this group 96% to 3%.  If you accept the assumption that the conservative base is roughly as large as, or slightly smaller than the pool of progressives, then that 40% number seems pretty high.  It's probable that the group consists of hard-core McCain supporters, as well as undecideds who broke for McCain.

Group C
Finally, and this is where things get interesting, you have 19% of voters who found that both candidates possessed the right experience for the job.  We'll call these people "Group C."  This group, which probably tracks more or less with undecideds, broke overwhelmingly for Obama, 85% to 12%.  For this group, clearly both candidates had the "right experience" for the job.

McCain clearly won the "head-to-head" battle over the "right experience - Group A vs Group B - attracting more voters who felt that only he had the right experience than the people who felt similarly about Obama. But, the lions share of Group C voters, voters who thought Obama had at least as much experience as McCain, wound up supporting Obama.  Thus, Obama passed the competency threshold test

While a variety of factors probably contributed to this phenomenon (namely, McCain's paralytic response to the financial crisis compared to Obama's cool stoicism), you can say with some confidence that Obama was able to be good enough on national security. Though he may not have had the support necessary to trump McCain head-to-head, especially when it comes to national security, where McCain had a built-in advantage, he was certainly good enough to convince a critical mass of people he had the core compentencies to be President, and this extends to national security. 

Comments

[Don Bacon]

"Matt said something that I hadn't heard before on how national security issues played out in the 2008 election"

Perhaps the reason you never heard it before is that the poll had nothing to do with "national security issues," whatever they are.

[Dan Kervick]

It is unfortunate that the election never gave rise to the broad and interesting strategic debate on national security and foreign policy that many of us hoped it would be. The debate remained instead a largely tactical debate about how we should deploy or re-deploy our military and diplomatic resources in the limited theater of the Middle East. Almost the entire rest of the world was left out of the discussion, and the general public never got much of a sense of any deep differences over national direction in the world.

Despite that, I am convinced that Obama does see the globe, and our place in contemporary history, in some substantially different ways than John McCain, and has a very different understanding of present global challenges and opportunities, the long-term threats to US security, and the degrees and priorities of those threats. Unfortunately, few of those differences were able to come out. My sense is that Obama initially prepared to engage in a broader and deeper foreign policy debate, but that once the economic crisis intervened, he decided to play it safe on foreign policy, and stick with the economy.

[TE Lawrence]

Unfortunately, Yglesias misses a few important developments:

"Election Data: Military Communities Shifted Democratic in 2008"
http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=2EE0E46DD134196B5EE669EE9D5C4B56?diaryId=2189

"Dems get new crop of military voters"
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15455.html

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