In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only 22 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. launching missile strikes against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against civilians. A new Post-ABC poll finds that 86 percent of Republicans support Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Syria for the same reason. Only 11 percent are opposed.

It is difficult to explain this shift by anything other than partisan bias. The case for a US strike in 2013 was at least as strong as it is today. In both cases, Assad had just used chemical weapons against civilians, and was also slaughtering far larger numbers of innocent people with conventional weapons. If anything, the risk of a strike was lower in 2013 than now, because at that time there were no Russian troops on the ground aiding Assad. Thus, a US attack in 2013 would not have carried as high a risk of a confrontation with Russia.

For a great many Republicans, the difference between 2013 and 2017 was largely a matter of who was in the White House. They were unwilling to support a strike by a Democratic president, but far more enthusiastic about a very similar (except possibly more risky) action by a Republican one. Such partisan bias on the part of Republican voters mirrors that of many GOP members of Congress. Here too, many who opposed a possible Obama strike in 2013 are perfectly happy to support Trump today.

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The Post-ABC poll indicates somewhat greater consistency on the part of Democrats. Some 37 percent of them back Trump’s strike, compared to a statistically indistinguishable 38 percent who backed a strike in 2013. However, the two cases are not entirely parallel. In 2013, there was no actual strike, as Obama was lukewarm about the idea and ultimately chose not go through with. Had he actually launched an attack, more Democrats might have rallied around their party’s leader in the aftermath.

Be that as it may, Democrats, like Republicans, have demonstrated considerable partisan bias in assessing past military actions. A major case in point is the decline of the left-wing anti-war movement during the Obama era, despite Obama’s starting two wars without congressional authorization, and pursuing other policies that Democratic anti-war activists vehemently protested under Bush. As sociologists Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas show in in an important book, the Bush-era antiwar movement largely evaporated under Obama in large part because of many of its leaders and activists were partisan Democrats who did not want to oppose a president of their own party. Like Republicans who approved of Trump’s Syria strike but opposed very similar action contemplated by Obama, many Democrats gave Obama a pass on policies similar to those they vehemently opposed under Bush.

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