Part of what’s going on here, according to researchers who study public opinion, is that Republicans tend to stand by their own leaders, while also being predisposed to judge Democratic presidents harshly.
“Republicans have always been less inclined to rally behind a Democratic president than Democrats have been to rally behind a Republican president in times of crisis,” said Matthew Baum, a professor of global communications at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Baum has found that when a Republican is president during a foreign crisis, the average boost in approval rating among Democrats is nearly 8 percent. But when a Democrat is president, the rally effects are “smaller and insignificant,” he wrote in a 2002 paper. Those figures included George W. Bush, who experienced a 35 percentage-point boost in support after Sept. 11.
“It’s a little challenging to make the comparison for specific events, since each conflict is different,” Baum said in an email. “But the differences in rally size are pretty stark.”
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