Framing the Exit: Pollsters, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Military Withdrawal

What shapes public support for withdrawal from an ongoing military intervention? While there is a vast literature on the public's support for new military interventions and its approval of interventions that are underway, there is very little research on public opinion around the explicit question of ending a military campaign on foreign soil and "going home." This is surprising, given the salience of questions about terminating military interventions in contemporary world politics, from Afghanistan to Ukraine and beyond. In this research note, we argue that the public's expressed appetite for exiting from an intervention is influenced in crucial ways by framing choices made by public opinion pollsters. In particular, we contend that whether pollsters frame withdrawal as an enemy victory or not and the alternate response options they provide around it can strongly impact its appeal. To test these ideas, we pair an observational analysis of public opinion polls over time on American support for military withdrawals from 1946 to 2021 with an original survey experiment conducted about the 2021 NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. The results reveal that both the enemy victory frame and what we call the middle ground frame exert a powerful influence on public support for withdrawal, and do so across people with different partisan and foreign policy predispositions. These results help provide insight into when people support going home in war, while also extending the considerable literature on framing choices in opinion polling in new ways.