The days when voters put their partisan differences aside during a national security crisis appear to be over.
Few notions are as ingrained in political punditry as the idea that foreign crises unite Americans behind their president. It’s called the “rally ’round the flag effect” and it’s been taken as fact by commentators and chased by White Houses for decades. But it’s also something of a political urban legend. While there are examples of presidents seeing a public approval boost during a crisis, there is also evidence that the improvements are minimal and fleeting — and perhaps getting less common in our hyperpolarized politics. That hasn’t kept presidents from trying. On Tuesday night, President Biden used his State of the Union address to call on Congress to stand with him to condemn the invasion of Ukraine commanded by President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “He thought he could divide us here at home,” Biden said. “Putin was wrong.” On one level, the president was right: Biden does have solid bipartisan backing for his policy of isolating Russia while backing Ukraine. Foreign policy experts of all types have praised the administration for its deft handling of European politics, which has resulted in crippling sanctions on Russian oligarchs and financial institutions, and for its use of intelligence to expose Kremlin designs on Ukraine. And though many questions about U.S. strategy remain unanswered, even Senator Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, said on Tuesday that there was “broad support for the president for what he’s doing now.” But Democrats expecting voters in both parties to give Biden credit are likely hoping in vain. “If the crisis is just fodder for the usual partisan debate, then there’s not much chance the president will see his approval rating increase much,” said John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. The term “rally ’round the flag effect” was coined by John Mueller, a political scientist who studied the relationship between presidents’ actions and public opinion. In a 1970 paper, Mueller argued that under certain conditions, many voters will shed their partisan allegiances during foreign policy crises and support the commander in chief. The concept became conventional wisdom in the years that followed — and seemed to be borne out during conflicts like the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when President George H.W. Bush saw his approval rating zoom up. It even inspired a movie: “Wag the Dog,” a 1997 comedy in which a cynical political operative fabricates a war in Albania to divert attention from a presidential sex scandal. The phrase “wagging the dog” has since become pundits’ shorthand for the notion that a president can distract the public from troubles back home by focusing on a conflict overseas. More recent scholarship, however, has found the rally effect to be minimal. In 1995, when scholars John R. Oneal and Anna Lillian Bryan crunched the numbers for 41 foreign policy crises between 1950 and 1985, they found that the average change in the president’s approval rating was just 1.
