American Voters More Fearful After Paris Attacks
One week after the terrorist attacks in Paris, Diane Lochocki drove with her boyfriend from New York to the New Hampshire State House. Ben Carson was filing for the presidential primary, and Lochocki, 78, wanted to see him. It was time for a new president, one who actually took the threat of radical Islam seriously.
“Terrorists are insidious people,” Lochocki said. “Your neighbor could be one and you wouldn’t know. I feel we should close our borders until we get the rest of the world under control. If that’s inhumane, then I’m inhumane. You think what you want.”
The attacks that killed 130 and injured more than 350 in France’s capital Nov. 13 changed the 2016 contest for president — by changing what voters worried about. Across the country, among both Republicans and Democrats, have come pronouncements of anger and fear not seen after the terrorist attacks in London or Madrid — or even, in some ways, after Sept. 11, 2001. Suspicion of Muslims and intolerance of refugees have exploded; so has criticism of President Obama’s handling of the terror threat.
A Suffolk University-Boston Globe poll Saturday confirmed it, with 42 percent of likely voters in New Hampshire’s upcoming GOP primary calling terrorism and national security the country’s most important issues. Before Paris, they’d worried most about the economy.
In more than two dozen interviews over the weekend in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Alabama, voters offered some clues as to why Paris has altered the consciousness so dramatically. They described feeling more afraid of the Islamic State, more horrified by the imagery of beheadings and other atrocities. They are uncomforted by Obama’s leadership. And with the pain of the Iraq war still weighing on the nation, they are even listening to the people who say the United States must send troops to the Middle East to fight the Islamic State. (Read more from “American Voters More Fearful After Paris Attacks” HERE)
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