Voters overwhelmingly reject resuming the military draft and more than a third fear a draft is likely if President Bush is reelected while a somewhat smaller share predict that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry will follow a similar course if he wins, according to a new Washington Post tracking poll.
Three in four likely voters currently oppose resuming the draft while one in five favor reviving it. Opposition to conscription is both deep and broad: Six in 10 likely voters strongly rejected the draft while only 8 percent strongly favored it.
| U.S. President | | Updated 2:09 AM ET | Precincts:0% |
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Both Bush and Kerry have declared they will not reinstate the draft, which was suspended three decades ago. Similarly, The Post poll found that opposition to the draft spans the partisan and ideological divide. More than seven in 10 Republicans, Democrats and political independents reject reviving the draft, as do equally lop-sided majorities of political conservatives, liberals and moderates, the survey found.
With Iraq and Afghanistan stretching the U.S. military thin, a small but significant minority of voters expect that a draft will be needed regardless of who is elected president. Thirty-six percent of likely voters said a draft was "very" or "fairly" likely if Bush is reelected, while 28 percent said it's likely if Kerry is elected.
Two-thirds of all Kerry voters say a draft is at least fairly likely if Bush wins next month, while just 13 percent of the president's supporters agree. But those partisan differences largely vanish when voters were asked about Kerry: Roughly equal shares of the Democratic nominee's voters (26 percent) and Bush supporters (30 percent) believe a draft is possible if Kerry is elected.
Republicans had been concerned that the draft issue, which has been circulating in the for weeks, might hurt Bush among younger voters. But the survey found little difference by age among those most likely to vote in November, suggesting that Bush's current weakness with younger voters may have as much or more to do with broader concerns about the economy and the overall situation in Iraq than specific fears about a reinstituted draft.
The survey also found that six in 10 voters are concerned about the upcoming flu season, although only about one in four said they were very worried. The flu issue does not yet resonate as a voting issue, with only about one in four people saying the Bush administration bears much blame for the current shortage of flu vaccine. Again, sharp partisan differences emerge: about half of all Democrats but few Republicans or independents currently fault the Bush administration for the shortage, which was caused when vaccine from a manufacturing plant in Great Britain was found to be contaminated.
The latest Post tracking poll shows Bush leading Kerry 50 to 47 percent. Independent Ralph Nader got 1 percent of the hypothetical vote. A total of 1,586 registered voters were interviewed Wednesday through Friday nights, including 1,248 likely voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for the overall results.
