Trends In Support Among Republicans for Aid to Ukraine

To:                   Interested Parties

From:              Steven Moore, Republican Political Strategist Based in Kyiv

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As perhaps the only person in the world who has delivered humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian front and whipped votes on the floor of the House of Representatives with then Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, many of my American friends have asked me to analyze the dynamics among House Republicans and Republican voters regarding aid to Ukraine.

Forty-two percent of the members of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives voted against aid to Ukraine in the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This mirrors public opinion among Republicans - 47% of Republicans and 54% of Trump voters polled in July favored decreasing military aid to Ukraine. Republican members of Congress are facing mounting political pressure to vote against aid to Ukraine from Republican voters driven by TV news personalities repeating the Russian narrative.

The decision for House leadership to place a bill for Ukraine aid on the House floor for a vote is already going to be difficult. If the number of House Republicans opposed to Ukraine aid grows to 50%, it could make the difficult decision almost impossible.

Good news: Reagan Foundation polling from June has found messaging that moves 18% of Republicans polled to be more favorable to military aid to Ukraine, from 41% to a more comfortable 59%. The paragraph below should be repeated by supporters of Ukraine aid as frequently as possible.

The US has spent roughly $24 billion on military aid to Ukraine, which is roughly 3% of the US military’s own budget. Ukraine remains in control of roughly 83% of its territory and US intelligence believes the war has severely degraded Russia’s military power and its ability to threaten NATO allies. 

Repeated use of this messaging – highly repetitive use of this messaging – can make a substantial difference in providing support for Republican members of Congress who want to support aid to Ukraine. Unfortunately, effectively countering the volume of Kremlin propaganda that has found its way into conservative media costs money.

Potential Solutions

-       Increasing connectivity between the faith-based community in the USA and the faith-based community in Ukraine.

-       Organizing conservative American surrogates who favor aid to Ukraine to repeat the Reagan Foundation messaging as much as possible to conservative audiences.

-       Developing an organized “war room” effort to unite the disparate efforts at lobbying the GOP and changing opinions among GOP grassroots.

-       Creating a grassroots communication effort in key areas of the USA. This can be geographically and demographically precise effort, lessening the cost. This is not an effort to talk to every voter in the entire country, just to give accurate, poll-tested information to Republican primary voters in key areas of the country.

-       Mobilizing pro-Ukraine voters in targeted Congressional districts.

DETAILED ANALYSIS

House Voting Patterns

The US House of Representatives has voted four times since the beginning of the war on aid to Ukraine – once in May 2022 for the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriation and three times in July 2023 on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The three July amendments - Greene 21, Gaetz 22 and Ogles 25 – would have drastically cut US aid to Ukraine had they passed.

Looking across these four votes, 103 sitting Republican members of Congress have voted at least once against funding for Ukraine, 76 have voted against Ukraine aid at least twice, 66 have voted against Ukraine aid at least three times and 34 have voted against Ukraine aid at every opportunity. Thirty-two House Republicans flipped from voting for the May ’22 aid package to voting for cutting aid to Ukraine in July of 2023.

In the House of Representatives, the majority party controls what legislation is put on the House floor for a vote. Traditionally, the majority party only puts legislation on the House floor that is supported by a majority of the majority party. In this case, the Republicans have 222 members, so a majority of the majority is 112 Republicans. Again, 103 Republicans have voted at least once against funding for Ukraine.

The good news is that many of these votes against Ukraine aid were cast in favor of NDAA amendments that were almost certainly not going to pass. In essence, these votes did not count. Some members of Congress may vote in favor of an amendment cutting aid as a political vote, so they can say to their voters that they did not write a blank check to Ukraine.

The bad news is Republicans are feeling so much political pressure on matters concerning Ukraine that they feel it necessary to take political votes against Ukraine aid. Thirty-two Republicans that voted for Ukraine aid last year voted against it on the NDAA amendment votes.

The question is, how much additional political pressure will build before a vote on Ukraine aid that counts, and will these members who took a political vote against Ukraine aid vote against funding for Ukraine when it counts?

The trends do not favor Ukraine aid.

Republican Public Opinion on Aid to Ukraine

In mid-May 2022, around the same time as the vote on the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriation, 23% of Republicans and 23% of Trump voters were against sending weapons to Ukraine.[1] Twenty-seven percent of the Republican conference voted against the aid package.

In July 2023, around the time of the NDAA vote, 47% of Republicans and 54% of Trump voters polled favored decreasing military aid to Ukraine.[2] Forty-two percent of the Republican conference voted for amendments that cut aid to Ukraine.

While there is no algorithm for predicting House votes based on public opinion, certainly a correlation exists. And again, if internal House Republican whip counts show more than half of Republicans opposing aid to Ukraine, it will be very difficult to bring it to a vote on the House floor.

Effective Messaging on Ukraine Aid

The good news for turning down the heat in the political environment is that the Reagan Foundation[3] has found persuasive messaging that moves 19% of Republicans to be more favorable to supplying military aid to Ukraine.  

There are three elements to this message:
1) The amount of aid is not that much relative to defense spending

2) Ukraine is winning

3) Russia’s war fighting capabilities are being severely degraded

Back to the bad news. Believing that Ukraine is winning is a key component of the above messaging, and according to Economist/YouGov polling, only 20% of Republicans and 15% of Trump voters believe that Ukraine is winning.

The percentage of Americans believing that Ukraine is winning has never been high, regardless of success on the battlefield.

Tucker Carlson

Carlson, it should be noted, is the American TV personality that the Kremlin wants Americans to see. Olga Skabeyeva, the “Iron Doll of Putin TV,” calls Carlson “our favorite.” She and other Kremlin propagandists give completely false anti-Ukraine talking points on their shows, Carlson repeats them on his show and the following evening the Kremlin propagandists air the clip from Carlson’s show. When he left Fox, numerous Russian TV personalities offered Carlson a job and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, took time from a news conference at the UN to lament Carlson’s departure.

While Carlson favors Kremlin propaganda and has little regard for the truth, his August 22 show with a retired U.S. military officer bashing Ukraine with Kremlin narratives received 9.4 million views. Carlson is not on nightly, but when he is on, he has a large following. His August 22 Twitter show roughly doubled Carlson’s nightly cable news viewers. That being said, it is difficult to ascertain how many of those views were Russian bots.

Primary Election Dynamics

When I was working for House Republican Leadership, the average House office received 50,000 constituent contacts per year. In high performing offices, these contacts are closely monitored and analyzed. The Founding Fathers designed the House of Representatives so its members needed to be responsive to their voters. That dynamic remains in effect today.

From my conversations with current chiefs of staff, House offices are receiving considerable amounts of negative constituent contacts on aid to Ukraine. One House chief told me in April of 2023 that the exact same people who were contacting her office in March of ’22 asking them to do more for Ukraine were now asking why Congress was doing so much for Ukraine.

House members on both sides of the aisle are concerned about a primary election challenge rather than the general election in November. The vast majority of House seats are “safe” Republican or Democrat seats, meaning the general election is not a concern. As many as 90 percent of House districts, depending on how you analyze it, are so packed with voters from one party that the other party has no chance of winning in the general election in November. Twenty percent of Americans vote in primaries and decide who sits in the House and they trend toward the extreme wing of both parties. As such, electoral incentive is to run to the extreme of your party rather than to the center. The Republican primary voter skews anti-Ukraine.

This incentive to appease the more extreme primary voters drives members to take “political votes,” as noted above, and could drive them to vote against aid to Ukraine when it counts.

Ironically, aid to Ukraine may be easier to pass next year. The majority of primary elections in America are over in March, and the date for someone to file to run against an incumbent member of Congress is typically about ninety days prior to the election. As an example, the last date to file as a candidate for the March 5, 2024, primary election in Texas is December 11, 2023. When members of the House know they don’t have a primary challenge, they can vote more easily for unpopular but vital legislation.

Legislative Dynamics on Spending Bills

Republican primary voters skew anti-spending as well. Currently, the discussion in Congress is centering around how spending bills will be passed. Many observers think a government shutdown is possible and the mood the mood in Congress is not just anti-Ukraine spending but anti-spending in general.

The 2024 budget request is $6.9 trillion, making the $20 billion request for aid to Ukraine less than .29% of the federal budget. Yet it appears this request will generate an outsized portion of the debate, driven by grassroots Republican primary voters informed by Kremlin talking points.

How can we change the perceptions of the Republican grassroots?

Most solutions require money. Countering the volume of Russian influence in conservative media is not easy. But if Congress ceases to support aid to Ukraine, it would likely mean the evaporation of the international coalition supporting Ukraine. If Xi Jinping were to see that the world forgets about the Russian invasion of Ukraine after 18-24 months, it would likely embolden his ambition to take Taiwan.

Potential Solutions

-       Increasing connectivity between the faith-based community in the USA and the faith-based community in Ukraine.

-       Organizing conservative American surrogates who favor aid to Ukraine to repeat the Reagan Foundation messaging as much as possible to conservative audiences.

-       Developing an organized “war room” effort to unite the disparate efforts at lobbying the GOP and changing opinions among GOP grassroots.

-       Creating a grassroots communication effort in key areas of the USA. This can be geographically and demographically precise effort, lessening the cost. This is not an effort to talk to every voter in the entire country, just to give accurate, poll-tested information to Republican primary voters in key areas of the country.

-       Mobilizing pro-Ukraine voters in targeted Congressional districts.

---

[1] Economist/YouGov polling https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/xvzad8pjc0/20220521_econTabReport_revised.pdf

[2] Economist/YouGov polling https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/x9yx1on3ip/econTabReport.pdf

[3] Reagan Foundation polling https://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan-institute/centers/freedom-democracy/reagan-institute-summer-survey/

---