On Iran, a reminder that party trumps values

After Trump's Iran attack, MAGA voters are not isolationist anymore

Dear readers,

Last week, I wrote in my weekly chart article "The myth of Republican isolationism" that the GOP is not in fact the party of isolationism, despite the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump and his coalition. I pointed out that support for joining Israel's war against Iran was higher among Republicans than Democrats, even though it was still very low (around 20% for Trump voters) overall.

In hindsight, in terms of absolute (compared to relative) support for war, I think the title of the article exaggerated the lack of isolationism among Republicans at the time I published. After all, 20% approval for intervention is pretty darn low — roughly equal to support for the U.S. joining World War II before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

But now, six days after Trump dropped one of the biggest payloads of conventional bombs in history on Iran, I think we have even more data — and a new angle — supporting the original thesis. This week's Chart of the Week is about how public opinion can change dramatically in response to actions by a party leader. This is: The myth of Republican isolationism, part 2.

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Did you miss June’s Q&A? Read part 1 here and part 2 here. Submit a question for the July mailbag by emailing questions@gelliottmorris.com.

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MAGA is not an isolationist movement

I wrote on Saturday night, a few hours after Trump announced the U.S. bombing of Iran, that people should generally expect an increase in support for military action over the next week. I made that prediction for two reasons.

First, because there was a positive shock in support for past wars in the Middle East just after the U.S. government engaged in its initial attacks. The surge was anywhere from 10 to 20%, depending on the war. With history as our guide, that’s a pretty strong trend.

This prediction turned out to be right; According to YouGov, support for bombing Iran rose from 21% to 35% over the last week, and opposition dropped from 57% to 46%.

Note that the bombing is still the least popular act of war in the Middle East since at least 2001.

The second reason we should expect an increase in support is partisanship. The political scientist Gabriel S. Lenz has documented a pronounced follow-the-leader effect in public opinion, where many partisans adopt the positions of the leader of the party they affiliate. This is the opposite of the way democratic folk theory thinks about opinions, whereby voters independently develop political attitudes and issue positions first, and then pick the party closest to their beliefs. This is also the argument of one of the more famous books in political science published in the last decade, Democracy for Realists.

Polls show a strong follow-the-leader effect in GOP public opinion on Iran.

Before the strike, a poll from YouGov and The Economist found that just 16% of voters wanted the U.S. to be "involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran." That included just 22% of Republicans and 19% of Trump voters. A review of many different polls from CNN found similar broad opposition to a strike among both Republicans and the public overall.

However, in surveys conducted after the strike on June 21, Republican support for Trump's actions has surged. In YouGov's polling, 68% of Republicans now support Trump bombing Iran. Meanwhile, support among Democrats didn't budge at all, and Independents moved just 9 points toward support.

To prove this is not exclusive to YouGov’s polling, another company got similar results this week. A new Washington Post/George Mason University survey finds Republican support for a strike rising from 47% to 77%. For comparison, political independents moved 10 points in Trump's direction, and Democrats stayed put. (Note that small changes in question wording can lead to different results across surveys.)

So, depending on the pollster you're looking at, the strike in Iran moved public opinion among Republicans anywhere from 30 to 50% in favor of the president's position. Talk about a follow-the-leader effect!

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Partisans are partisans first, and almost everything else second

It’s hard to see this data and come to any other conclusion than this: Many Republicans do not hold isolationism as a value above their partisanship.

When push comes to shove, party loyalty and following the leader override some abstract commitment to staying out of foreign conflicts. If Trump decides that the MAGA movement should abandon isolationism altogether and invade Iran, then a large chunk of the movement will follow suit. The speed and scale of the shift in Republican opinion after Trump's decision to bomb Iran is a textbook example of this.

It is not an overstatement to say that, for many partisans, the value they hold above all else is loyalty to their party. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

From my perspective as a pro-democracy analyst and amateur social scientist, it’s not clear how a fanatical commitment to the party line is compatible with democracy. In theory, citizens are supposed to develop their own views on issues and then choose parties that reflect those values. In practice, however, many voters take their cues from party elites, especially the leader, and adjust their positions accordingly. This is a problem that gets worse when news outlets abandon facts.

Of course, partisanship is not just a Republican phenomenon, but Trump’s gravitational pull on opinion is unlike the force wielded by any other politician. And the current moment offers a particularly stark illustration of how party identity can override longstanding ideological commitments.

And for people like me, it's hard to argue that the public should take public opinion seriously when voters are this fickle.

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Have a nice weekend (hopefully one without a news event that needs a Saturday night article),

Elliott

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Postscript: Trump is unpopular on immigration, Redux Edition

Finally, political science literature has long found a disconnect between general, abstract values (like "isolationism") and specific actions that we expect, in general, to go along with those values (like bombing Iran). Bob Shapiro points me to his discussion of this disconnect regarding foreign policy with co-author Benjamin Page in The Rational Public

And on that point, I'm going to take a short victory lap regarding immigration, deportations, and the protests in LA.

Two months ago, I published an article with the headline "Trump's immigration agenda is not popular". This was a novel contribution at the time, drawing on my own compilation of hundreds of polls on immigration conducted in Trump's term up to that point. It is my most successful Substack article to date.

In that piece, I wrote that the popular conventional wisdom about Trump's position (that he was strong on the issue and democrats shouldn’t “raise the salience” of it) was wrong, since voters supported deporting undocumented immigrants who had committed crimes, but not other types of immigrants (grandmas, kids, the guy who sits next to you in church, the nice lady who serves you pancakes at the diner, etc). I wrote a similar article, with even more data, earlier this month.

Well, you don’t have to take me at my word on this anymore. The real world has supplied data that further confirm my argument.

The first empirical test of this argument was the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. At the time, I wrote that focusing on this case of a mistaken deportation would change how voters felt about Trump on immigration more broadly, because it reframed the debate. Abrego Garcia changed the picture in people’s heads from a big border wall to a person getting kidnapped and sent to prison in a foreign country (and his wife and kids left alone at home).

I followed up on that post with some actual experimental survey evidence on messaging regarding Abrego Garcia. I found a 20-point swing in support for blanket deportations of 10 million undocumented immigrants after people learned about Abrego Garcia.

And then, on June 5, I looked back at polling on immigration and deportations, and found a large dip in support for Trump's immigration agenda after the Abrego Garcia news took over the national conversation.

Three months later, Trump's approval on immigration is about 15 points down from where it started. And support for deportations is also underwater — by 20 points, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll. That poll also finds the public has double-digit net disapproval for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Trump's immigration agenda more broadly, and Trump sending in the Marines and National Guard to quell protests against ICE in Los Angeles in early June. Fifty-five percent of voters said they preferred giving most undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status, and 36% said they preferred deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Now, that’s just one poll. But other polls show the same trend. Trump's approval rating hit an all-time low of -11 in our Strength In Numbers average on Wednesday.

The error mainstream analysts made was twofold. First, they assumed that a broad poll questions about the president captured the detailed portrait of public opinion on an issue as complex as immigration and deportation. And second, they assumed that public opinion is static, rather than dynamic. Pundits repeated the same error after those protests broke out against ICE in LA, and were proved wrong by both mobilized resistance (in the No Kings Day protests) and the polling data.

This won't be the last time this happens.

I don't want to be too self-congratulatory, but I think this is a good example of the value proposition of the type of journalism that we are publishing here at Strength In Numbers. In general, our analysis of public opinion has been somewhere between two weeks and two months ahead of the competition.

Our "secret weapon" is analysis that obsessively tracks and properly contextualizes the data — instead of simply obsessively hewing to one's priors. When I started writing about public opinion on immigration in April, some very powerful writers were on the other side of the argument. But now their data has caught up to ours, and they have since come around to our way of thinking — and even deleted the tweets they originally sent in opposition.

If you want to support independent journalism that starts with the data and then forms an opinion (rather than the other way around) please become a paying member of the Strength In Numbers community today. We are a reader-supported publication — we literally can’t do this without you.

Thank you.