As former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign limps along to South Carolina after disappointing fourth- and fifth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, there’s a key issue that has been mostly absent from the campaign trail: foreign policy. With the exception of the brief moment immediately following the death of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, where Democrats devoted time to foreign policy during their January debate, the issue has mostly returned to its place low on the list of voter priorities.
Democratic voters have consistently said that Biden is the best in their presidential field for handling foreign policy issues, but he has not seemed to benefit from that assessment so far at the ballot box.
When something big happens, such as the decision to withdraw troops from Syria or the death of Soleimani, pollsters will often hop into the field to gauge where people stand. Yet there are serious challenges in understanding voters’ views on foreign policy and national security issues, largely because when the news is not dominated by coverage of war or international crisis, the issue easily recedes from voters’ minds. Healthcare, education, taxes — all of these are issues with which people have daily contact. Going to the doctor, sending your children to school, and looking at the deductions from your paycheck all provide reminders of what is at stake — and offer voters a sense of how they might stand on an issue.
The average person is much more likely to have negotiated with a health insurer than to have negotiated with Iran. Even in our ever-connected world, where a virus overseas can rapidly hopscotch to our shores or a viral video can shine a spotlight on tragedies a world away, issues without an immediate, direct, personal connection are less tethered to concrete experience. This makes people’s foreign policy views less clear and more malleable.
Take the issue of Russia. Prior to President Trump, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to view Russia as a geopolitical threat. Today, Democrats are nearly six times as likely as Republicans to list Russia as the country posing the greatest threat to U.S. security.
As a result, my firm, Echelon Insights, conducted a survey of a thousand registered voters across the country to explore their views not just on specific countries, incidents, or news stories but on their intuitive responses to how the United States generally ought to conduct itself on the world stage, militarily as well as cooperatively. To do so, the firm posed a series of questions about the development and projection of military power as well as questions about the ways the U.S. could engage with the international community. Intentionally, we aimed for a range of questions that would yield variety — there were some questions that we expected would garner broad agreement and some that we expected would be rather divisive — in order to truly tease out the full spectrum of viewpoints.
The results paint a fascinating picture of how foreign policy divides look across both the Republican and Democratic parties.
For Democrats, international engagement is a consensus view: The U.S. ought not look inward and ought to partner with and support other countries often. While there is reluctance to use the military in a number of circumstances, there is still broad acceptance that the U.S. ought to assist and collaborate with the rest of the world.
Where Democrats are divided is over the appropriate uses of military force. While Democrats and Republicans share the view that the military ought to be used to prevent or stop acts of genocide abroad, that consensus melts away when people are asked if the military should be used to preempt an imminent threat, with fewer than half of Democrats saying it should. Nearly half of Democrats oppose increasing the size of the military.
Republicans, meanwhile, also have skeptics concerning the use of military force or the growth of the military, but those skeptics are also more likely to oppose other forms of cooperation or engagement in the world. While our survey finds few pure isolationists, Republicans who tend to be more supportive of a muscular foreign policy also tend to be more supportive of things like providing developmental assistance or participating in international organizations.
While foreign policy divides in the Democratic Party may fit somewhat neatly along a “hawk versus dove” spectrum, with those divides being mostly about military might, Republicans’ foreign policy divide cuts along the related axes of military and cooperative engagement.
