Iraq Casualties and the 2006 Senate Elections

Abstract

Prior scholarship on the effects of war casualties on U.S. elections has focused on large‐scale conflicts. For this article, we examined whether or not the much‐smaller casualty totals incurred in Iraq had a similar influence on the 2006 Senate contests. We found that the change in vote share from 2000 to 2006 for Republican Senate candidates at both the state and county level was significantly and negatively related to local casualty tallies and rates. These results provide compelling evidence for the existence of a democratic brake on military adventurism, even in small‐scale wars, but one that is strongest in communities that have disproportionately shouldered a war's costs.