Forget the "MAGA split" on Iran. It's the independents and soft partisans that matter.
Plus, most "moderates" favor left-wing economic policies. Your weekly political data roundup for March 15, 2026.
This is my weekly roundup of new political data published over the last seven days.
Leading off: This week, I’m writing about the debate over whether the war in Iran is fracturing MAGA. I think the media is looking at the wrong group of voters.
On deck this week: Tuesday’s Deep Dive will be about how Donald Trump’s working-class voters are feeling about the economy — and him — and Friday I’ll have a new Chart of the Week on whatever happens this week!
Let’s get into the Iran debate.
1. Forget the “MAGA split” on Iran. It’s the independents and soft partisans that matter.
Everyone seems to care about what the MAGA elites are saying about Trump’s war against Iran. Republican media darlings like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon have all criticized the president’s actions in some shape or form. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress partly in protest of Trump, posted about “another forever war.” Bloomberg, ABC News, AP, and Slate all run pieces about a MAGA civil war.
It was all assumed doom and gloom for Trump among his most dovish supporters. Then, Gabe Fleischer over at Wake Up To Politics published the following chart of polling data on the MAGA divide for a piece titled “There is No MAGA Split on Iran.”
The chart shows that roughly 90% of self-described “MAGA Republicans” favor Trump’s war in Iran. So much for that civil war!
This is a good use of polling data, but both sides of the debate are missing the larger point on polling about Iran. Whether MAGA elites are driving MAGA (or other!) Republican voters away from Trump is important, but it’s a separate question from both (a) that of the MAGA elite divide, and (b) about how non-MAGA Republicans and swing voters are feeling. MAGA elites are interesting to the media because they are media figures, but when it comes to voters, the people we care about are independents and persuadable soft partisans — definitionally, not MAGA at all.
Is there a MAGA split? Sort of.
First, is it true that there’s no MAGA split on Iran? I realize I’m splitting hairs here, but the polls above show roughly 10% of MAGA voters disapprove or don’t know how they feel about the war in Iran. This may seem small, but if you benchmark MAGA voters at half of trump voters, then losing 10% of them, or 5% of his total coalition, would have knocked him down to just 47% in the popular vote in 2024. Small changes can have big effects.
And if we buy that pressure to agree with the party leader is higher when you’re in social groups where everyone is fervently devoted to him, that 10% defection is extremely meaningful from the perspective of individual voter psychology. Yeah, it’s only 10%, but it is harder under this model to get that 10% defection among true MAGAs than among independents.
Still, certainly Fleischer is right that there is no mass exodus from Trump among the Carlson-Kelly-Bannon wing of the party — that there is no “civil war.” At least, there’s no civil war in any meaningful sense; even while the generals are bickering with the commander’s strategy, the rank-and-file are not.
When it comes to public opinion, this is not subversive, but rather exactly what we should expect. Yes, per a Quinnipiac poll, Republicans still approve of the military action 85-11. Yes, Americans who call themselves “MAGA supporters” or “Trump-first” (compared to country-first) are overwhelmingly on board. And they are not swayed by party elites that are contradicting what their party leader is saying. But is that surprising? These voters are Trump-first, not Bannon-first — in the causal diagram from information input to belief, these voters’ opinions on the war are downstream of their opinion of Trump, not the other way around. If he says it’s necessary, they’re in. The real MAGA split is among elites, which might have implications in Washington, but not necessarily in Waukesha.
It’s not all that counterintuitive that the base is holding, in other words. It always holds — that’s what makes it a base. Fleischer rightly points out that just because there’s an elite split among MAGA doesn’t mean there’s a split among voters. In doing so, he is showing how Strategist/pundit brain is causing many in the media (to be clear: not Gabe) to misread the public opinion on the ground.
The group that actually matters
So if the base is holding, why does the war matter politically? Because the people who actually decide elections aren’t in the base — and they’re turning. Political independents and soft partisans — voters Trump converted in 2024 to beat Harris — are more loosely attached to Trump and support his policies less. When political conditions deteriorate for the GOP, it’s these voters who are the first to leave.
What MAGA elites think might matter to other elites (people who have dinner with Steve Bannon), but when it comes to elections, they are at best a sidebar. Here’s the data:
In March, a Marist University poll found that 59% of independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of Iran. CNN found only 32% of independents approve of the strikes. Quinnipiac has independents opposing military action 60-31.
As I covered in this week’s podcast, independents are one key to the rally-around-the-flag dynamic in presidential approval. The other is soft partisans. And the news for Trump here is even worse. According to the new NBC News poll this week, just 54% of Republicans who call themselves “non-MAGA” support the war in Iran. Other pollsters (CNN, YouGov) have this percentage slightly higher, around 62%, but that’s still a meaningful defection from the party leader.
The effect of the elite MAGA split on mass opinion may also be larger than the chart above, which focuses attention on the MAGA GOP bar, implies. That’s because if you’re looking for impacts of MAGA elites disagreeing with Trump on public opinion, it’s not going to be among the MAGA base, but rather among the soft Republican partisans and independents that lean toward the GOP. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling Trump out for starting another “forever war” isn’t going to change the opinion of someone who has been supporting Trump since 2015. But it might cause degradation in support with someone who voted for Trump in 2024 because he promised lower prices and no more foreign wars.
Why does this group matter more than the MAGA base? Because elections are won and lost at the margins. The MAGA base will show up for Republican candidates regardless of what Trump says or does. There is a cult-like psychology operating at this fringe of the political spectrum. Soft partisans, on the other hand, are the voters who decide elections. Trump did not win in 2024 because he convinced 5% more Americans to be hard-core MAGA, he won because enough Democrats switched their votes or stayed home that Harris fell underwater in the swing states. Similarly, the 2018 election was partly a function of soft Trump voters staying home because they disapproved of how he was handling health care and immigration. They are the difference between a normal midterm correction and a wave.
Today, Democrats are up 5 points among registered voters in polls testing the 2026 House generic ballot. Whether they get to +7 (2018) or +10 will be due to independents and soft partisans.
The war in Iran doesn’t need to fracture MAGA to hurt Republicans in November. It just needs to keep soft partisans and independents sour on the direction of the country.
The media is focused on loud, media-adjacent MAGA figures saying they don’t like the war, and then mapping that fracture onto the people who call themselves the most ardent Trump supporters. Gabe Fleischer points out this split doesn’t exist in the masses. The real defection is among soft partisans — loosely attached voters who swung to Trump in 2024, and are already drifting away.
Maybe a pithy way to say this is: Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have Twitter followers. They don’t have swing voters. (And: if you spend a lot of time on social media, you think these people are more important than they are.)
2. What Strength In Numbers published last week
Here’s everything I published at Strength In Numbers last week:
Last Sunday, I pointed out that 64% of Americans want to stop changing the time (most people favor permanent Daylight Saving Time):
For Tuesday’s Deep Dive, I took a look at how Trump’s “borrowed voters” — young, non-white, and lower-income voters who swung to him in 2024 — are feeling about him now (spoiler: 20% already disapprove):
This week’s podcast is about why Trump hasn’t received a “rally around the flag” approval bump for the Iran war (it’s not just that the war is unpopular, but that’s a big component):
And Friday’s Chart of the Week contains all the data I shared during the podcast. I graphed every president’s approval rating during “rally around the flag” events, from WWII to Iran. Only a handful of conflicts produced clear jumps:
PS: Strength In Numbers is hiring part-time survey research assistants to help analyze our monthly polling data. If you know R and survey methods, check out the listing:
If you’re a frequent reader of Strength In Numbers, I’m confident you will get a lot of value out of a paid subscription. Subscribers get Tuesday’s premium Deep Dive each week, plus access to the full archive, and you’re supporting independent data journalism.
3. Even more numbers!
GOP House candidates in competitive primaries are spending the most on ads that mention Trump — a sign of how central he remains to the Republican brand, even as his overall numbers decline: Battleground Issue Tracker - powered by AdImpact
CNN asked survey respondents to say in their own words what they want to hear Trump talk about — the results are a window into what voters actually care about vs. what dominates the news: CNN recordings of most important problem from survey takers
Seth Masket built a simple midterm forecasting model using economic growth, presidential approval, and seat exposure. Every scenario points to Republican seat losses large enough to flip the House: GOP on track for a thumpin’ in the midterms
Perry Bacon at the New Republic digs into polling showing that self-described moderate Democrats are actually pretty liberal on economics — 70% say the party is “too timid” on taxing the rich: Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate.
And that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. Strength In Numbers will be back in your inbox on Tuesday!
Got more links for next week? Email me or add to the comments below!
thank you so much for Strength in Numbers--I read you faithfully and you regularly introduce light into darkness
It’s a simple rule. Committed cultists, including MAGA voters, will not undrink the Kool-Aid. They’ll just suffer the consequences.