Donald Trump launched airstrikes against Iran on Feb. 28, 2026. In the two weeks since, I’ve already written about how the public opposed the strikes from the start and how nearly every poll on the war so far confirms this trend.
Another question I’ve seen people ask is whether the war will impact the president’s overall approval rating at all. Political strategist Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week that it looked unlikely Trump would see a so-called “rally around the flag” effect in his rating — the surge in presidential approval that typically follows the start of a military conflict.
But does it? Many in the media refer to the rally effect as a reliable pattern in American politics. But when you look closely at the data, genuine rallies are rarer and harder to detect than the conventional wisdom suggests. Only three conflicts since WWII produced clear, double-digit bounces in net presidential approval: the Gulf War (+29), WWII (+19), and Iraq (+17). Several others —…
