All the polls on the U.S. war in Iran so far
According to a simple average of new high-quality surveys, 38% of Americans approve and 49% disapprove of U.S. military action in Iran. When ignoring "don't know" respondents, 56% disapprove
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One of my favorite things to write here at Strength In Numbers is the simple yet effective polling roundup. After a big news event, I compile all the new surveys pollsters have released and see what story comes out of the data. I did this after President Donald Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles in June 2025 — data suggested the action would hurt Trump on immigration, which went against the conventional wisdom at the time — and again when the government shut down in October last year. I view this as something of a public service, and usually a story comes out of the data, too.
This week was another obvious candidate for a polling roundup piece. The President launched his war in Iran early in morning U.S. time on Saturday, Feb. 28, which gave pollsters plenty of time to run new polls on Sunday and early this week. The table below shows the results of these surveys, as well as the text of the question pollsters asked voters (paraphrased in some places) about the war.
Today’s Chart of the Week is: All the polls on the U.S. war in Iran so far.
All the polls on the U.S. war in Iran so far
Here’s that table:
The big takeaway from these numbers is that the new war in Iran is very unpopular. Not merely negative-number-so-what unpopular, but worst-ever-support-for-war-when-it-started unpopular. With just 38% of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014.
Here’s another potential framing of this data: The Trump administration is now justifying their bombing — including of an all-girls elementary school — as both a pre-emptive strike against a nuclear Iran and a necessary response to an imminent threat against Israel. But at 38%, the public isn’t buying it. Across every major nonpartisan poll conducted since the strikes began, more Americans oppose the military action than support it.
No president in modern polling history has launched a major military operation with the public already against him. After the September 11 attacks, a November 2001 Gallup poll found 90% of Americans approved of military action in Afghanistan, with just 5% opposed. The Gulf War in 1991 hit 79-80% approval. Gallup measured 76% support for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (Pew had it at 71%).
And even more recent operations still drew majority backing — Trump’s own Syria strikes in April 2017 polled at 50% approve, 41% disapprove, and Obama’s Libya intervention in 2011 came in at 47-37.
On his handling of the war, Trump starts 21-22 points behind a president’s previous net low.
Some other stories in this data
Here are a few other points that stood out to me in the new and historical data. First, the erosion in support for Trump’s war isn’t just among Democrats. Among Republicans, roughly 70% back the Iran strikes. That sounds high until you compare it to the 96% of Republicans who backed Afghanistan and the roughly 90% who supported Iraq. Even Trump’s own base is less enthusiastic about this war than Republicans have been about any major military action in decades.
And that makes sense, since on November 5, 2024, Trump promised Americans in a televised speech, “I will tell you, you’re not going to have a war with me, and you’re not going to have a third world war with me.”
Second, did you spot the outlier? Fox News found a 50-50 split in approval of “the current U.S. military action against Iran?” But, as Ruth Igelnik at the New York Times notes, Fox’s question came after a series of other items on U.S.-Iran relations that could have “primed” responses to say yes, including one asking whether Iran posed a “real national security threat” (61% said yes). “The results may have been influenced,” Igelnik writes, “by the placement of the prompt after a number of questions about the conflict.”
Third, Trump fares no better in polls from Republican-aligned pollsters that use extremely leading question wording (and which do not appear in my table above). OnMessage, a Republican consulting firm, asked respondents whether they agreed that Trump “is right to help free citizens from oppressive governments, like Iran’s and Venezuela’s, that take away rights from their own people.” And the Trafalgar Group asked about “Operation Epic Fury where US and ally troops prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and destroyed its missile arsenal and production sites, which resulted in the death of an adversarial leader.” 53% and 54% of Americans agreed with either question, respectively.
My take is that these are pretty dismal results for such biased question wording! These are polls designed to produce the most favorable number possible. And they barely cracked a majority.
Trump starts where Iraq and Vietnam ended
Readers have been asking me whether Trump will get a “rally-around-the-flag effect” in his overall approval rating for his war, as presidents have historically when they used force abroad. The answer is clearly not yet, and probably not at all. YouGov’s latest poll for The Economist has Trump at 38% approve to 59% disapprove, a net of -21 and a record low for his second term. Over at 50+1, Trump’s approval average is down about half a point relative to last week.
Also, wars only get less popular. Public support for military action collapses over time as casualties mount and costs become clear. The Pentagon has said six Americans have already died in the war against Iran, and estimated the cost of the war at around $1 billion per day. A Morning Consult poll found 63% are worried about the war causing gas prices to increase.
In August 1965, months after the first combat troops arrived in Vietnam, 24% of Americans told Gallup that sending troops was a mistake. It took more than six years of escalation and body counts before a clear majority (55%) finally said it was.
If you ignore people who say they “don’t know” how they feel about the war, disapproval of Trump’s actions is already at 56%. That is higher than the resistance to Vietnam in 1971.
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I really appreciated discussion of how various polls word their questions, especially conservative polls seeking certain biased results. I live in a red area where people endlessly disparaged Biden online, often over gas prices. I can’t remember seeing gas spike this high.
Next week's polls will be interesting. Because not everybody has had to buy gas yet. for ex, I gassed up Sun b4 prices had a chance to change. When I was running errands Thurs, I noticed that gas was up 20 cents. Why am I having to pay more for gas when the felon told us after the Iran strikes last June that Iran's 3 facilities were 'totally & completely obliterated.'
& the regime using 'Israel was under threat of attack' as justification? Read the room. American support for Israel has taken a beating given how it conducted its response to the Oct 7 attacks.