Recent war casualties that hit close to home most powerfully influence individuals' perceptions of war, according to what researchers say is the first study of how war casualties at the local level affect public opinion. Scott Sigmund Gartner, an associate professor of political science at UC Davis, and his colleagues found that, for example, the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive 30 years ago this season marked a dramatic change in the way Californians perceived the war. "All Politics are Local: Local Losses and Individual Attitudes Towards the Vietnam War," recently published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, examined the effects of local casualties on about 6,500 California respondents to nine polls during the war. Respondents in counties that recently had high killed-in-action rates were less likely to support the war. The influence of the casualties on opinion varied, however, with the relative increase or decrease in the number killed and the immediacy. During the war's early years through the Viet Cong's prolonged attack against Saigon and elsewhere in South Vietnam in 1968, casualties mounted quickly. Then, local and national casualties were important, and individual demographic factors like race and income were less so in explaining opinion, say the researchers. Shortly after Tet, casualties came at a decreasing rate. They became ineffective in predicting individual opinion. Instead, individual factors were effective. Over the course of the entire war, though, women, Jews and those with more education were the only identifiable groups consistently less supportive of the war. .