Iraq and the Democratic Candidates, or Let's Fact-Check Frank Rich
In Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich said this:
By the same margins as before (sometimes even slightly larger), a majority of Americans favor withdrawal no matter what happened during the “surge.” In another poll (Gallup), a majority still call the war a mistake, a finding that has varied little since February 2006.
It’s safe to assume that these same voters did not forget that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards enabled the Iraq fiasco. Or that Mr. Obama publicly opposed it. When Mrs. Clinton attacked Mr. Obama for his supposedly “irresponsible and frankly naïve” foreign policy ideas — seeking talks with enemies like Iran — she didn’t diminish him so much as remind voters of her own irresponsibility and naïveté about Mr. Bush’s Iraq scam in 2002.
This is one of the myths of this campaign: Clinton’s position on Iraq hurts her among Democratic voters. (Edwards gets a pass, the conventional wisdom goes, because he has more convincingly repudiated his 2002 vote.)
And then you get this result from the New Hampshire primary exit poll:
Those who want to withdraw troops as soon as possible (43% of the sample) are more likely to support Clinton (41% do so) than Obama (34%). The people who want to withdraw troops gradually (51%) are evenly split. And the 5% who want to keep troops there longer? They support Obama more than any other candidate.
In other words, it is not “safe to assume” that Democratic voters will punish Hillary Clinton for her early support of the Iraq War.
Comments
Lots of independents probably voted in the New Hampshire primary, so exit poll results for Dem candidates there may not be representative of "Democratic voters" -- the folks Rich was talking about presumably.
Posted by: Joe | January 9, 2008 11:26 AM
I'm willing to bet that a large proportion of those "independents" are weak/leaning partisans. The preferences of most of those who chose to vote in the Democratic primary aren't likely too far out of line with the self identified Democrats.
Posted by: KKB | January 9, 2008 11:52 AM
Results like this --- and also exit poll results from IA suggesting that Edwards (the left most of the three major Democratic candidates) won a plurality of conservative Democratic caucus-goers -- suggest to me that early primary state voters may not be that much more informed in their voting than average voters (at least relative to their depiction in media accounts), despite the barrage of paid media and retail politics. This seems particularly plausible in the modern era, in which motivated voters in any state can use the internet to learn about candidates more easily than they could several decades ago. Is anyone aware of any extant (and particularly recent) research about how early-primary-state residents compare to the rest of the country in terms of political information, being able order the candidates across a range of policy and ideological scales, etc?
Posted by: Kevin Collins | January 9, 2008 12:00 PM