Following the terrorist attack in Paris last month, Marco Rubio said that he was “not happy” but called it a “positive development” because it “suddenly has forced Americans to confront more carefully the issue of national security.” Rubio called it a “political advantage.”
A new study suggests he might be right.
The peer-reviewed research, published in “Psychological Science,” found that “terrorism may make liberals think more like like conservatives.”
The authors, based in the UK, looked at newly available polling data taken before and after a major terrorist attack, the July 7, 2005 bombing in London. They found, somewhat predictably, that “terrorism shifts public attitudes towards greater loyalty to the in-group, less concern with fairness, and greater prejudice against Muslims and immigrants.” More notably, “this effect is stronger on those who are politically left-leaning than those who are right-leaning.”
This phenomena, which has been the subject of previous research, is known as the “reactive-liberals hypothesis,” which posits that “conservatives constantly feel under threat and are therefore less reactive to situational threats than are liberals, who become more attitudinally conservative following situational threats.”
In the study, participants were asked about their general moral perspective as well as their specific attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants. The study found that after the bombings, the attitudes of liberals more closely matched those of conservatives.
For example, levels of prejudice toward immigrants among liberals more closely aligned with those of conservatives after the bombings.
This change may explain why the Republican presidential field has been quick to seize on the terrorist attacks in their campaigns. During the last Republican debate, Rubio and the other presidential candidates repeatedly validated the fear and anxiety that Americans may feel after an attack like San Bernardino.
They had plenty of help from moderators. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer declared “Americans are more afraid today than they’ve been at any time since 9/11.” Writing in Politico, Mike Grunwald wrote that the “main theme of the debate — from the candidates, but arguably from the network as well — was that they ought to be even more afraid.”
The new research suggests this could be a winning strategy, helping shift more voters to support candidates that support border walls and turning away 5-year-old orphans from Syria.
It largely mirrors the successful Republican strategy from 2004, where President Bush and his allies seized on the 9/11 attack to scare voters away from John Kerry, using the issue to drown out other topics that were not as politically advantageous. In a book released years later, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge revealed that he was “pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.”