By Miles D. Williams, Data for Political Research

I study and teach about international politics for a living, so it’s no surprise that this is my default lens for thinking about Presidential elections in the US. Compared to other issue areas, the US President has a lot of latitude in foreign policy. This is partly because most American citizens are tuned out of international affairs (other than Gaza!), but other factors contribute to the President’s outsized power in foreign policy, too. Three major contributors are the War on Terror, the fact that the Presidency is a unified branch of government that can respond quickly to world events, and a dysfunctional Congress that has increasingly abdicated its foreign policy authority to the White House. Whoever assumes the Presidency, this person will have a lot of power to determine how the US conducts itself in international politics. This got me thinking, do students at Denison care?

To answer this question, I looked at responses to the March 2024 survey fielded by DPR. Since this is an election year, the survey included a bunch of questions about student attitudes and anticipated voting behavior in the upcoming election. One set of questions asked students how much they agree or disagree with a series of statements about the possible consequences of the 2024 election. The one that interested me most was the level of student agreement with the statement: “The US may lose its world power status as a result of this election.”

The US is a major world power that often adopts a leadership role in international affairs. If students have a clear understanding of the role the US President plays in foreign policy, then they should have a strong opinion about whether US world power status is in jeopardy with the upcoming election. We have a sitting incumbent (Joe Biden) pushing for aid for strategically important partners like Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan; an international coalition to respond militarily to Houthi Rebel attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea; strong economic ties with countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific; and generally a foreign policy geared toward maintaining the Liberal International Order. By contrast, Biden’s challenger (former President Donald Trump) expresses a lot of skepticism about US aid to strategic partners, going as far as saying that Putin can do whatever he wants with NATO allies that fall behind on defense spending. He’s also opposed to trade agreements that he claims will lead to US jobs going overseas. So, overall, he’s in favor of a more constrained approach to US military support and foreign aid abroad and is in favor of protectionist economic policies.

Whichever candidate students prefer, I would expect, at minimum, there to be some polarized opinions on whether the 2024 election will impact America’s world power status—assuming students actually care about foreign affairs. So what do we see in the data? 406 students completed the March 2024 survey. As the below figure shows, a plurality (~35%) of students are neutral about whether the 2024 election will have an impact. The second most common response is that students don’t agree that America’s world power status is in jeopardy (~31%).

So most students don’t seem too worried. But how does this break down by partisanship? The next figure below shows the average agreement/disagreement with the idea that America may lose its world power status because of the 2024 election by party lean, ranging from Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right. It’s clear that on average students are neutral on this question, but Republicans disagree.

When we break this down by how students say they’ll vote in 2024 (or would vote if they could), we can see that Trump voters most strongly disagree that America will lose its world power status because of the 2024 election.

Clearly, Republicans and Trump voters most strongly disagree that the country’s status is at stake. One explanation for this is that these individuals generally doubt the hype that this election will be especially problematic. The next figure below shows that students who are most skeptical that America’s world power status is at stake in the 2024 election also tend to be more neutral on whether or not the election will lead to a decline of democracy in the US and to violence and turmoil.

We’re still a ways out from November, so attitudes may change. For now, Denisonians appear to be neutral about whether this upcoming election will impact America’s world power status, while Republicans and Trump voters disagree that America’s status is in jeopardy. This disagreement goes hand in hand with skepticism about other possible negative outcomes from the 2024 election. While all of this is interesting, the most significant takeaway for me is that many students simply lack an opinion about how this election will affect America’s standing in the world. Maybe many students have carefully considered the issue and truly don’t know how things will shake out. But it’s more probable that most students just aren’t tuned in to international affairs, just like a majority of the American people.

Miles D. Williams (“DrDr”) is an avid gym rat and wannabe metal guitarist who teaches courses for Data for Political Research. He tries to talk about his research on Twitter (it’s not “X”), but could do better.