A tale of two columns, part 3

 My last post noted that although confidence in the military had increased since the 1970s, it had declined in the last few years.  I wondered if this drop had been across the board or differed by party, so I got partisan breakdowns for 2019-2024 and added a few earlier years for comparison (the surveys on confidence have been taken almost every year since the 1980s, but I didn't have time to enter data for all of them).  Average confidence in the military by party:

Republican confidence rose dramatically between 1999 and 2004, and then stayed high during the Obama and Trump administrations, before dropping during the Biden administration.  Democratic confidence hasn't changed much, except for an unusually high level in 2011.  The partisan gap was much smaller during the Biden administration than during the Trump administration.  As it happened, Kristen Soltis Anderson talked about this issue in a column in the New York Times today.  She treated it as a new development--"something important is unfolding in America that hasn’t happened in many years: We’re more united in our outlook about our country’s institutions"--which she suggested was related to an ideological realignment of the parties.  However, from another point of view there's a consistent pattern:  partisan differences were smaller in the Obama and Clinton administrations than in both the Bush and Trump administrations.  A pattern like this could be explained as a combination of two things:  Republicans tend to have more confidence in the military and people have more confidence in when the president is from their own party (which makes some sense, the President is commander-in-chief).

But confidence in the military obviously can be influenced by other things as well:  presumably the initial success in the Iraq war helps to explain the rise between 1999 and 2004.  What about the decline under Biden?  There was one notable negative event:  the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which did not go well and was followed by a substantial decline in Biden't approval ratings.  But that was in August 2021, and the surveys are taken in June.  Republican confidence dropped sharply between 2020 and 2021--that is, before the withdrawal--and actually rose a little between 2021 and 2022.  So the drop seems to have been simply a response to the change in administrations, not to military failure.  But that raises the question of why there wasn't a similar drop in Republican confidence under Obama.  One possibility is a general halo effect--a sense of optimism under Obama that colored views of all institutions (at least in the early years).   In any case, I think I'm justified in closing with the cliche that more research is needed.