June 23, 2006
THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE POLL
Excerpts from Mystery Pollster, Mark Blumenthal, www.MysteryPollster.com
Last Sunday, Bush press secretary Tony Snow speculated about what polls might have shown during World War II: "If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, 'Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?.'"
In fact, there was a poll taken by Gallup from Dec. 31, 1944, to Jan. 4, 1945 -- three years into that war and right in the middle of the bloody Battle of the Bulge, where U.S. casualties were estimated between 70,000 and 80,000. It found that 73 percent of Americans would refuse to make peace with Adolf Hitler if he offered it and that 86 percent of Americans thought there was no chance that we would lose the war in Europe.
Adam Berinsky, an associate professor of political science at MIT who found the survey in the Roper Center Archives while researching a book on World War II had this to say about the quote from Tony Snow. . . .
The roots of this partisan divide can be found in the actions of politicians. From 1938 through the end of 1941, support among politicians of both parties for some form of U.S. involvement in World War II increased generally over time . . . But after U.S. entry in the war, FDR secured the support of his Republican opponents and both parties expressed a strong pro-war message. Conversely, even before it began, the war in Iraq has been strongly associated with President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress. Though Democratic politicians have not until recently expressed open opposition to the war effort, they have never joined en mass with their Republican counterparts in openly supporting the war.
Patterns of agreement and disagreement among partisan political actors play a critical role in shaping popular responses to war. As long as Republicans continue to support the President, support for the Iraq will continue to hover in the mid-forties - where, as Jacobson shows in his book, it has stayed since early 2004. But without the support of politicians from across the aisle, the American people as a whole will never support the Iraq war. Among both politicians and the mass public, the Iraq war is a Republican war.
