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The main argument that Michael and I propose in our book is that support for the antiwar movement overlapped with support for the Democratic Party. So, in other words, when people were coming out to protest, they were protesting the war and using it as an opportunity to protest George Bush and the Republican Party.

So what happens is when the party moves on — when the Democratic Party starts to get victories and they start getting elected to office — there’s less of a motivation. Those identities start diverging from each other.

People have to make the choice, maybe unconsciously, where they could say, “You know, I could keep protesting the war, but does that make Obama look bad? Is that an issue we want to avoid?” And in the case of the antiwar movement, partisan motivations and partisan identities won the day.

The primary evidence for this is that the size and composition of antiwar movement changed dramatically over the course of the 2000s. We surveyed about ten thousand protesters from 2004 to 2011. We also collected data on protest event size from various sources, such as the National Parks Service and various media outlets. We discovered that around 2004 and 2005, protests were relatively large, attracting hundreds of thousands of people. We also found that about 50 percent of the people we surveyed at these events claimed to be Democrats. By 2008, the size of the protests had collapsed, to hundreds of people, and only about 20 percent claimed to be Democrats.

Additionally, we asked people to list the reasons for attending an antiwar protest. The number one and number two reasons were consistent over time — people wanted to voice opposition to war and wanted to “express” themselves. Tellingly, the importance of partisanship changed radically over time. Early on, anti-Republican statements were the third most popular reason for protesting. By 2009, anti-GOP reasons were the eleventh most popular reason.

The book presents evidence in other ways. For example, we looked at bills sponsored in the US House of Representatives and the Senate that tried to end or limit the wars in Iraq. Before Obama took office in 2009, we found a surge in antiwar bills. In the 110th Congress, we found sixteen bills that had committee hearings. The number drops to zero in Obama’s first two years. We found a similar rise and fall in other types of bills, such as those that received votes, an important measure of the political will behind a particular policy proposal.

Early in the 2000s, the antiwar movement was large, vibrant, and decidedly partisan. Starting with the 2006 election, the antiwar movement declines and loses its partisan and Democratic character. This is a problem because the antiwar movement relied on Democratic activists for everything from participation in street protests to sponsoring antiwar legislation.