In his Afghanistan speech this week, President Donald Trump announced that while his “original instinct was to pull out,” he will nonetheless be sending more American troops—it wasn’t clear how many—into the country. “Since the founding of our republic,” Trump said, “American patriots from every generation have given their last breath on the battlefield for our nation and for our freedom.”

But, for all his lofty rhetoric, Trump might come to regret this decision. In a recently released research paper, we examined the relationship between states’ and counties’ casualty rates in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their electoral support for Trump. What we found was a significant correlation between war casualty rates and Trump votes. In fact, we think three states key to Trump’s victory—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—might have swung the other way if they’d had even modestly lower casualty rates.


Our findings suggest that Trump drew support from American communities that have seen firsthand the human costs of war—and could pay those costs again with coming escalation in Afghanistan. Trump’s Afghan gambit, in other words, risks retribution at the ballot box in 2020.

Trump’s iconoclastic campaign for the presidency was often short on clear policy proposals. But one area in which he distinguished himself from his opponents, in both the primaries and the general election, was foreign policy. While he sounded traditional Republican notes demanding increased military spending, he also starkly denounced America’s military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan: He routinely called both conflicts “total disasters” and “wastes of money,” and pledged that his administration would put “America first” and avoid the “stupid wars” of its predecessors.

Trump didn’t directly address the class and cultural gaps in military sacrifice in America, but his rhetoric likely resonated with the small slice of the country hardest hit by recent wars. Today, less than 1 percent of the nation’s population has served in theater in Iraq or Afghanistan, while those who have died or were wounded in battle in those wars comprise less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the nation’s population. And these people are disproportionately drawn from communities that are more rural, less wealthy and less educated—communities that are often labeled a key part of the Trump base.

Might these Americans’ anger, frustration and sadness over these wars have propelled Trump to victory? We set out to answer this question by looking at the relationship between state-level U.S. casualty rates (per million residents) in Iraq and Afghanistan, as tracked by the Defense Department, and Trump’s vote share in each state, relative to GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s in 2012. (This allowed us to control for the fact that Republicans generally might do better in high-casualty constituencies.)

We found that Trump significantly outperformed Romney in places that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan. True, Trump surpassed Romney’s share of the two-party vote in 40 of 50 states. But, as the figure below shows, Trump was particularly successful in states that had suffered higher casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We then examined data from each of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties, where the disparities in wartime sacrifice are even more extreme. At the county level, we were able to control for a range of other variables—including each county’s median income, educational level, racial demographics, urban-rural balance and military veteran population. Again, we found strong evidence that Trump was particularly successful in high-casualty constituencies.

Trump’s inroads in these communities, where many voters had abandoned Republican candidates in the 2000s, may have been pivotal. Our state-level regressions suggest that if three states key to Trump’s victory—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.

Americans who lost friends, family members and neighbors in the war in Afghanistan may have seen Clinton, who backed President Barack Obama’s decision to send more troops there, as supportive of those efforts; Trump’s isolationist rhetoric, on the other hand, likely seemed refreshing. But what now? Trump, convinced by the foreign policy establishment and brushing off the advice of his now-ousted strategist Steve Bannon, is expanding the very war he once so strongly criticized. In doing so, he joins George W. Bush, Obama, Clinton and virtually every other mainstream politician in overlooking the inequality of military sacrifice today in America.

Can Trump get away with it? We don’t think so. Already, important elements of the Trump base—led by Bannon and the Breitbart News machine—are pushing back against the president’s reversal. And our research suggests that if Trump wants to win again in 2020, he should be wary of amassing more casualties from overseas wars. As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently observed, casualties always pose risks to political leaders. But these risks are particularly acute for Trump, as they would fall heavily on his political base.

The foreign policy establishment might be cheering Trump’s decision. But his strongest supporters aren’t rooting for the establishment. And they won’t be rooting for Trump if their family members and neighbors return

from Afghanistan’s war zone dead or wounded. Trump finally listened to the experts in the room. But, unfortunately for the nation and for his electoral fortunes, this is one time he should have stuck with his instincts.