Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
You almost couldn’t design a more unpopular war. Not only do very few Americans support President Donald Trump’s attacks on Iran starting Feb. 28, but our chief ally in the ongoing conflict, Israel, also faces its lowest favorability in the U.S. in decades, Andrew Mangan reported at DailyKos (3/8).
Just 39% of Americans support Trump’s latest attacks on Iran, according to an average of 12 nonpartisan polls that Daily Kos collected. An average of 50% oppose the attacks, and 16% are unsure. (Those do not total 100% due to not all polls containing all response options.)
And there is reason to believe that support for the war is closer to its ceiling than its floor. A CNN/SSRS survey did not allow respondents to choose “unsure” as an option, and when forced to pick a side, 41% of Americans support the strikes, making for only a 1-percentage-point improvement from the average. Meanwhile, 59% oppose them—a 9-point jump over the average.
Historically, wars tend to begin with much higher levels of support. Just days after the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, Gallup found that 75% of Americans supported sending in troops. The same was true of the Afghanistan War (89% support in November 2001) and the Vietnam War (61% support in September 1965).
But as those wars dragged on and their financial burdens mounted alongside their casualties, domestic support dropped away. Just five years after the invasion of Iraq, Gallup recorded that 63% of Americans thought sending troops was a mistake. Even the Afghanistan War, started in response to the nation’s worst terrorist attack, hit net-negative support shortly before its end in 2021, after nearly 20 years of fighting.
Fear of starting a “forever war,” like the ones Trump campaigned against in 2024, has driven his administration to downplay how long the war on Iran might last.
“Four to five weeks,” Trump told The New York Times.
But most of the public isn’t buying that timetable. Just 25% of Americans think the war will be over in a matter of days or weeks, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. That’s roughly the same share that thinks the U.S. will be embroiled in Trump’s Iran war for years (22%). Even the fact that 1 in 4 Americans say they’re “not sure” how long it will go on expresses pessimism about the campaign.
“We are just getting started,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, as if that was what the American public wanted to hear.
Trump has refused to rule out deploying ground troops to Iran, but if he did that, public opinion would likely sour even further. Just 24% of Americans support a hypothetical troop deployment, while 58% oppose it, a survey from the Angus Reid Institute found.
At the same time, it is easy to imagine Trump claiming premature victory in the near future, only for the conflict to carry on or metastasize, much like former President George W. Bush’s boast of “Mission Accomplished” just six weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq. The war lasted for another 400 weeks.
