Swinging on the Exit Strategy

With the economy spinning out of control, the war in Iraq is no longer the No. 1 issue on the minds of American voters, but it is still an issue by which Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain stand diametrically opposed. It is also issue that is poised to swing states to the left or right.

There is no confusing the candidates’ positions on the Iraq war. John McCain, the Republican nominee, strongly disagrees with any plan that would withdraw troops from Iraq before the Iraqi government is capable of governing itself and safeguarding its people.

Barack Obama has called for an “expeditious yet responsible exit from Iraq,” and had introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.

“The Iraq war is highly unpopular across the board in every state, and many Republicans are even souring on it,” says Patrick Ottenhoff, an online strategist at New Media Strategies and author of TheElectoralMap.com, a blog relating politics with geography.

Polls show that McCain carries the burden of proof about convincing Americans that continuing to occupy Iraq is in the country’s best interest. According to a Gallup poll conducted in June 2007, 60% of adults said they would vote for a presidential candidate who supports legislation that includes a timetable for removing U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2008.

Since then, opposition to the war in Iraq has reached an all-time high. Sixty-three percent of Americans say Iraq was a mistake. The cost of the war has reached more than $525 billion dollars and claimed some 4,000 U.S. fatalities. Fifty-nine percent of Americans want withdrawal within a year, Rasmussen polls report.

“All of the research indicates that people want the troops home in a very reasonable amount of time,” says Silas Lee, a political pollster and professor at Xavier University in New Orleans. By aligning himself with conservative Republicans on the issue of Iraq, McCain could potentially alienate himself from moderate/liberal Republicans.

Another Gallup poll from February 2008 suggests that the spectrum of Republican opinion on what to do about the war is broad. At 81%, the Democrats have a greater margin in favor of a withdrawal timetable than opposed (15%). Although most Republicans (65%) reject the idea of creating a timetable for leaving Iraq, 32% are in favor of it.

“We have to be very careful about how we dissect the withdrawal strategy. The challenge for McCain is the fact that he did authorize funds for the war, but he has also made some strong statements being very critical about the war,” Lee says.

Of the Republicans who consider themselves moderate to liberal, 49% favor a timetable for withdrawal; 40% are twice as likely as conservative Republicans to say the U.S. made a mistake by getting involved in Iraq; and 52% are somewhat less optimistic than conservative Republicans (78%) that the surge is making things better.

Add to that the fact that 63% of independents believe getting involved in the war was a m

istake. If the general election is nose-to-nose as expected, these Republicans, along with independents, are in a position to change the course of the race in states that could swing for or against McCain or Obama.

“Among liberal to moderate Republicans…I think that any of them who vote for Obama probably would have chosen him anyway,” Ottenhoff says. “These Republicans in places like Fairfield County, Connecticut, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and Fairfax County, Virginia. have been drifting away from the GOP for a long time. The war may have sparked, if not accelerated, their cooling to the Republican Party, but that trend has been set in motion for quite some time now.”

According to the Rasmussen Website, polls indicate that McCain’s support for the Iraq invasion is one of voters’ chief problems with the senator. That Obama opposed the war early and consistently is an ace in the Illinois senator’s pocket.

McCain continues to focus on winning the war and is in support of Bush’s current plan, which involves sending surges of soldiers back into Iraq. Obama’s concern is to reduce U.S. liabilities in Iraq by withdrawing brigades one at a time.

Rasmussen polls also show that 35% believe it is very or somewhat likely that McCain as president would have American soldiers out of Iraq by the end of his first term, but 60% believe Obama would bring them home in that timeframe.

“Also research indicates that many voters understand that this will have to be a phased exit, but they at least want a strategy in place to ensure some sort of transition in the exit that will allow for the troops to return,” Lee says.

Faculty at the University of Chicago’s department of political science published a paper which focused on the change in President Bush’s 2004 showing compared with 2000. They suggest that the number of Iraq war casualties from a state significantly depressed the president’s vote in 2004, and that Bush could have won 2% more of the popular vote.

Estimates from one predictive model in the study report that had there not been a war, Bush would have beat Democrat John Kerry by a higher margin and he would have picked up a couple of key swing states, including New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

When examining war casualties per capita, Oregon, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Pennsylvania are ranked 11th, 12th, 17th and 26th, respectively, of the 50 states. “A November 2007 Strategic Vision poll found that a majority (53%) of Iowa Republicans wanted to get out of Iraq. That survey was a shock to a lot of people and was sort of the first time that people realized that unpopularity of the war had reached a tipping point,” Ottenhoff says.

In Colorado, a state that went Republican in 2004, 54% of voters say that bringing military personnel home from Iraq is more important that winning the war (39%), reports Rasmussen’s Website.

Nevertheless, polls show that McCain has an advantage in Pennsylvania (49% to 43%), Ohio (51% to 37%) and Florida (52% to 42%), three swing states whose support has historically been an indicator of victory for presidential candidates. Voters in these states trust McCain more than Obama to handle the war in Iraq.