War casualties in Iraq may play an important role in the presidential election this fall, suggests new research by UC Davis political science professor Scott Sigmund Gartner.

A study conducted by Gartner and Gary Segura, a political science professor at Stanford, reveals that senators from states that suffered a disproportionate number of casualties in the weeks before the 2006 midterm elections were punished at the polls.

The research suggests that an increase in casualties prior to the November 2008 election will hurt Arizona Sen. John McCain because the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has promised, if elected, to keep troops in Iraq until the government has been stabilized.

However, the casualties by themselves may not be enough to tip the election in favor of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama -- the would-be Democratic presidential nominee who has called for an immediate troop withdrawal -- because there are other factors that may help McCain and hurt Obama, Gartner said.

The study, "All Politics Are Still Local: The Iraq War and the 2006 Midterm Elections," appeared in the April issue of PS: Political Science, the journal of the American Political Science Association.

In deliberating their choice of candidates, voters look at the human cost of war as one factor, along with others such as revelations of prewar intelligence failures and manipulations, the study asserts.

"Local military casualties create a local political lens through which people view these national issues," Gartner said. "These recent casualties are more salient to voters because they lead to more news coverage, thus bringing the trauma closer to home as individuals can now translate an abstract number into a loss that is more personal and meaningful."

Consequently, Republican incumbents went down to defeat in November 2006 in five states among the 12 states (out of the 33 with Senate elections that year) with the most Iraq war casualties on a per capita basis the previous month.

Therefore, casualties "hurt" the Republicans more than they "helped" the Democrats because the incumbents are usually held responsible for the war's costs and its political ramifications, according to Gartner and Segura.

The same theory explains why some GOP senators retained their seats despite being associated with the party in power during the Iraq war. These elections took place in states with lower casualty rates, and the states basically stayed true to their political preferences.

"War has local political effects," Gartner said. "It creates an American experience, a state experience and even a town-by-town experience, and this influences the public's perception of its leaders and the conflict."

In a related study published in February in the American Political Science Review, Gartner proposed a political science theory that he calls the "rational expectations theory of casualties and opinion."

The theory is based on the observation that public support for elected leaders diminishes as both recent casualties and casualty trends increase. In particular, Gartner argues that people use trends to interpret recent casualties. Thus, for example, how people react to a costly month depends on whether casualties were high or low during the previous months.

Phat "Andy" Dang is a student writing intern for the News Service.