About · The Approval Gap

The paper

The Political Approval Gap and the Arithmetic of WPR Acquiescence: From Vietnam to Autonomous AI argues that the War Powers Resolution's fifty-year record turns on a single variable nowhere mentioned in its text: the gap between presidential and congressional public approval at the moment force is committed. The article narrates sixteen post-Vietnam operations, organizes their patterns into four findings, builds a hypothetical autonomous-AI deployment that breaks every assumption the 1973 statute was built on, and proposes a redlined revision designed to raise the price of executive evasion.

The site

Three corridors radiate from the rotunda landing page, each calibrated to a different reader.

The argument

For the reader who wants the prose. Sections 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 of the article in scroll, with the polling and the Sentinel hypothetical paced for screen reading.

The cases

For the journalist or researcher. All sixteen post-Vietnam operations, sortable by gap, evasion technique, and outcome, with click-through to the full case page.

The redline

For the staffer. The 1973 statute on the left, the proposed amendments on the right, with five clauses linked to the case studies that motivated them.

How the data was assembled

Approval values are drawn from the Gallup tracking series for presidential approval and the Gallup Confidence in Institutions instrument for congressional approval, taken at the closest available reading to the moment force was committed. Where Gallup didn't field in the relevant window, the closest contemporaneous reading from another major firm (Pew, ABC/Washington Post, NBC/WSJ) was used and noted in the case file.

The "moment force is committed" is operationally defined as the latest of three events: the President's order, the deployment of forces to the operational theater, or the first kinetic engagement. For pre-positioned forces, the order date controls. For prolonged campaigns, the value is taken at the operation's commencement and rerun at any major escalation; the rotunda chart uses the commencement value.

The "gap" reported throughout is presidential approval minus congressional approval, expressed in points. Rounding follows Gallup's published figures.

The redline

The redline is a working draft. The full text, with footnotes and commentary, lives in Appendix A of the article. Five clauses are wired with case-genealogy sidecars in this prototype; the others render as plain side-by-side text. Future work will deepen the sidecar coverage to every changed clause.

What's next

Twelve of the sixteen case pages are stubs in this build, carrying the dashboard summary and a forthcoming-treatment note. The four operationally distinct cases (Mayaguez, Lebanon, Kosovo, Soleimani) carry the deeper treatment that the others will eventually match. The redline's sidecars will extend across more clauses. A polling overlay component, where any case mentioned anywhere expands to its polling chart with one click, is planned for the next pass.

The site is hand-built static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with content stored in a single editable data.js file. No framework. No build step. It will load in 2036.

Contact and citation

For questions, corrections, or republication requests: vernon.winters [at] columbia.edu. To cite the article: Vernon M. Winters, The Political Approval Gap and the Arithmetic of WPR Acquiescence: From Vietnam to Autonomous AI (forthcoming Spring 2026).