The Truth on Iraq: Voters Wary of Precipitous Drawdown

Hard-left commentators routinely argue that "huge majorities" want out of Iraq, and that the war should be a slam-dunk for the Democrats in November.

Daily Kos, for example, recently went on and on about "how bad" the Iraq issue would be for the Republicans this fall, "The Iraq Problem For McCain and The GOP."

But as Andrew Kohut notes, the public's views on the conflict have lost urgency as a campaign issue, a trend that coincides nicely with the gains in security on the ground:

It turns out that Iraq is not the pivotal campaign issue that it seemed to be less than a year ago. Indeed, the war is no longer the top concern among voters.

A lot has changed with respect to Iraq in a relatively short period of time period. Voters have come to feel better about the way the war is going, and with American casualties declining, there is more optimism about our efforts there. While most Americans still believe the war was a mistake, the percentages of people who think the war is going badly or believe that the United States is losing ground against the insurgents has decreased compared with a year ago. In short, while no less important, Iraq is a somewhat less pressing issue....

At the same time concerns about the economy — and prices specifically — have soared. In almost all rankings of issues in national opinion polls, the economy is No. 1 and Iraq is No. 2.

How the war will figure as an issue in the coming election is complicated by ambivalent and contradictory public opinions. One of the more interesting findings in Republican exit polls was that John McCain, despite his strong support for the war, was more likely to win the backing of voters who disapproved of the war, while G.O.P. supporters of the war voted for other candidates (most often Mitt Romney.) And surprisingly, a late April Pew survey found voters thinking that Mr. McCain could do a better job than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in handling the war by a 50 percent to 38 percent margin in Mr. Obama’s case and a 49 percent to 43 percent margin in Mrs. Clinton’s case. A late May poll found a much closer division of opinion between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama, 46 percent to 43 percent, but not one that favored the Illinois senator.

Note something here: While a majority of Americans think the war's been a mistake, we continue to see the public resisting a preciptious retreat from the conflict:

Follow-up questions to those who favor withdrawal reveal that, relatively few think that American troops should be taken out immediately (16 percent); most favor gradual withdrawal (39 percent) over the next year or two. And follow-up questions to those who back keeping troops in Iraq until the country stabilizes also found a good number saying they favor a time table (14 percent). This leaves a relatively small segment of the public (26 percent) supporting an open-ended commitment to keeping American forces in Iraq.

I've written quite a bit on public opinion and Iraq.

One of the most egregious failures of the media in the last year is not only the increasing unwillingness of war opponents in the press to acknowledge the success of the Petraeus counterinsurgency program, but also the continuing meme that public opinion on the war is uniformly hostile to continuing the deployment.

Simply because the war's unpopular doesn't necessarily mean that we should throw our hands up and surrender.

See also my earlier entry, "The Radical Left's Denialism on Iraq Public Opinion."