Public opinion continues to sour on Trump, and the Iran War is making it worse, as I explained at New York this week:
Three weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, it’s going badly for Donald Trump: spiraling energy prices, confused messaging, diplomatic disarray, and ever-lengthening timelines for conclusion of the conflict. The war is as unpopular as Trump himself, though the administration is urging the media and the public to focus solely on its military successes. The commander-in-chief’s public approval is already weakening, with the worst very likely still to come. And things aren’t going very well on the home front, either, between gas-price shocks and long waits for screening at airports caused by a fight in Congress over the administration’s outrageous immigration enforcement practices.
In the Silver Bulletin polling averages, the president’s net job approval dropped to a new second-term low last week, and fell still more this week (it’s now at minus-16.7 ; at RealClearPolitics Trump’s average net job approval has also reached a second-term low of minus-15.0 percent). The mix of pollsters — some of whom would show Trump as relatively popular under any conceivable circumstances — builds some instability into the president’s numbers, but the overall trend lines are pretty clear. His job-approval average (now at 40.0 percent at Silver Bulletin) has been under 43 percent since mid-December; his job-disapproval average (now at a second-term high of 56.7 percent) has been over 54 percent since the beginning of the year. His current job-approval rating is lower than that of any president at this point in his first term dating back to World War II. That includes his own first term.
The war isn’t helping him. Now that it’s been part of the daily news for a while, the percentage of Americans with no opinion about the war has dropped steadily, and we can get a sense of the underlying level of support. It’s net negative in every recent poll. In the most recent surveys, the percentage of Americans supporting the war ranges from a low of 33 percent at the Daily Mail, to 35 percent at Reuters/Ipsos, to 37 percent at Economist/YouGov, to 40 percent at CBS News and Emerson, to 43 percent at Morning Consult. Polls with crosstabs invariably show strong support among self-identified MAGA folk (78 percent, according to a March 16 Economist-YouGov survey), with declining support among Republicans generally (73 percent) and Trump 2024 voters generally (69 percent). In the same poll, support for the war drops to 25 percent among Hispanics, 23 percent among independents, and 22 percent among those under the age of 30.
In terms of what happens next in the Middle East, polls consistently show majorities of Americans opposing the introduction of U.S. ground troops. The recent Economist-YouGov survey, for example, shows 64 percent of Americans opposing that development, and even a slight plurality of MAGA supporters opposing it. A more nuanced set of questions from Reuters-Ipsos, however, indicated that if ground troops are limited to “special forces” operatives, it wouldn’t be as strongly unpopular: While only 7 percent of Americans would support a “large-scale invasion,” 34 percent would support a “special forces only” deployment (a percentage that rises to 63 percent among Republicans, aside from the 14 percent who would back a full-on invasion).
Aside from the war, Trump’s approval numbers on specific issues remain underwater and relatively stagnant. According to the Silver Bulletin averages, he’s at net minus-9.8 percent (a bit better than when ICE atrocities were dominating the news) on immigration, minus-21.7 percent on the economy, and a dreadful minus-32.7 percent on inflation. These last two numbers bear watching if, as expected, high gasoline and other energy prices persist and other economic indicators remain shaky as the war drags on.
The generic congressional ballots showing party preferences in votes for the U.S. House remain solidly if not overwhelmingly pro-Democratic. Silver Bulletin pegs the Democratic advantage as 5.3 percent; it’s at 3.8 percent at Decision Desk HQ and 4.8 percent at Real Clear Politics. For what it’s worth, at this point in 2022 RCP gave Republicans a 3.5 percent advantage in the generic congressional ballot, and the GOP ultimately posted a net gain of nine House seats and flipped control of the chamber. With Republicans holding a mere two-seat majority in the House right now, there’s a lot of reason for Democrats to be optimistic about breaking up the GOP trifecta in November.
https://www.wsj.com/economy/global/world-bank-embraces-industrial-policy-abandoning-three-decades-of-stigma-740aff0f
Public opinion on the war (as with most things) is actually more nuanced.
“Most Americans don’t think the conflict with Iran is going well so far. It’s predominantly those who don’t approve of the conflict in the first place who hold this view.
The people who don’t think it’s going well express a collective uncertainty: they don’t feel they’ve gotten an explanation from the Trump administration. Many aren’t sure how long it will last.
They don’t see payoffs, not in making the U.S. safer, nor in making the economy stronger.
From a list of potential U.S. goals, most important to Americans is simply to see the war end as quickly as possible.
But there are other goals important to most Americans, too, including making sure Iran’s people are free and stopping Iran’s nuclear programs.
And it would be unacceptable to most to end with the regime still in power.
If those desires between goals and a fast end seem contradictory, it connects to the continued call for more explanation from the administration.
Even fewer today than when the war started say the administration has clearly explained the U.S.’ goals.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion-poll-iran-war-regime-2028-03-22/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ1APZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe-0cK-QYc3aZdjpr-vc1sTmyJEBQoNYrod0BGplkOe9HN1vqa_OdVoiQUGII_aem_MmPTSg6ozCrXGnmT7R_kOQ
If Trump loses the war there in a way be no better case for his criticism of where the US is heading at with its policies of deindustrialization.
Democrats may escape this during the midterms, but presidential candidates will need to explain whether their view of American interests and defense policy and if they view pacifism and non-interventionism as the future of the party’s ideology.
At the same time, Trump’s overall governing record is harming the right in a way the left could only dream of.
Tariff chaos (and a failure to communicate the need to think/plan long term) is driving countries towards more free trade agreements.
Immigration chaos is giving people second thoughts about deportation methods and goals (Trump could have focused on employer enforcement, welfare benefits for the children of illegal immigrants and payments for self-deportation, but instead he chose spectacle that backfired as well as failing to accept the appointment of new magistrate judges for warrants and the further criminalization of doxxing.)
The War in Iran is reminding people of the risks involved in dependence on fossil fuels. He is indirectly making fighting climate change relevant again, while at the same time proving that action must be quick in order to actually have an impact on consumer prices.
These 3 developments level the playing field for the left, to the point that the right’s sole remaining advantage comes down to transgender issues.
If you look at the governing philosophy of the European right it couldn’t be further away from the American one. Their success is actually based on expanding the welfare state, the only difference being that most new programs are targeted at families with children.
The US right is still mostly libertarian, while the European one is more firmly anchored in crony capitalism (specially farm subsidies).
While Trump is also moving in the direction of crony capitalism it does this mostly via a deregulatory approach.
Both the US and European rights are favoring prior incumbents and legacy industries. The result of this is making China stronger and the West weaker. The left barely talks about this because the left hates the notion of Western geopolitical power, while the right is in denial because of the highest levels of corruption in decades (if not a century).
Trump’s record shows the importance of actually allowing the right to govern. The European “cordon sanitaire” has been a failure that only improves the allure of parties that fail to deliver when in government (eg Netherlands).