Historically speaking, one of the best ways for any leader in any country to whip up domestic support is to start a war. Nationalism is a hell of a drug, and every time a war begins, you typically see a jump in public polling as people glom on to whatever justifications are being used at the moment to evoke their pride in their nationality. This is such a transparently obvious move by leaders across the world that Trump even knows it, as he wrote in 2012 that “Now that Obam’s poll numbesr are in tailspin – watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate.”
Two pertinent graphs from me tonight…
First, U.S. support for bombing Iran is very low — much lower than support was at the time for the American military attacking Afghanistan, Iraq, and ISIS.
Link: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/polls-amer…
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— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) June 21, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Second: Trump has a very low approval rating on foreign policy. At -14 right now.
Link to our recent Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll: www.gelliottmorris.com/p/polls-amer…
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— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) June 21, 2025 at 8:10 PM
YouGov/The Economist polling conducted ten days ago revealed that a little over 20 percent of Republicans believed that “America’s armed forces should get involved in the Israel-Iran conflict,” and the snap poll done after Trump joined the war finds that around two-thirds of Republicans “approve of the US bombing nuclear sites in Iran.” If you have a conservative friend sending that (garbage) study around suggesting that conservatives have more ideological diversity than liberals, send them these polls taken not even ten days apart and ask them to explain how endorsing the diametric opposite of what they just said they believed counts as ideological diversity.
This is generally how most polling looks these days, with Independents and Democrats largely recoiling in horror at everything Trump does, while Republicans fall in line behind dear leader. If there is any silver lining to this madness, it’s that polling right now looks nothing like it did in the lead up to the Iraq War, where a month before it began, a majority of Democrats favored “taking military action in Iraq to end Saddam Hussein’s rule.” Most Americans have learned the dangers of pursuing regime change in the Middle East, and even Republicans understand this as demonstrated by their opposition to a theoretical war a week ago. But now that we are in an actual war, any principled stance to it has gone out the window on the majority of the right, as just a small minority is maintaining the same belief they had ten days ago, while the rest of America is echoing all other polling, proving that nobody wants this.
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