Americans broadly disapprove of the Trump administration’s military strikes on Iran, according to several polls conducted after the U.S. attacked Tehran early Saturday morning.
Nearly six in 10 Americans said they oppose the decision to take military action against the Middle Eastern country, according to a text poll conducted by SSRS for CNN on Saturday and Sunday. A separate SSRS poll, conducted via text message for The Washington Post, found that more than half of Americans disapprove of the strikes, with 52 percent opposing and 39 percent supporting.
The lack of public support for President Donald Trump’s decision to move forward with airstrikes comes as White House allies worry the move could throw the GOP’s fragile coalition into jeopardy ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. A POLITICO poll conducted in January, when the president was still weighing diplomatic and military options, found that nearly half of Americans opposed the possibility of military action in Iran.
Support for the attacks was largely split along partisan lines, with Democrats far more likely than Republicans to say they opposed Trump’s decision.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend, which closed before the U.S. military announced the first American casualties in the war, found that 55 percent of Republicans approved of the strikes — but 42 percent said they would be less likely to support the attacks if they resulted in American troops being harmed or killed.
The Washington Post poll also found that Americans varied widely in their impressions of the Trump administration’s primary goal in the conflict, with some respondents citing regime change and others pointing to oil or regional stability.
The administration has repeatedly said that the strikes were motivated by the goal to destroy Iran’s conventional and nuclear weapons programs — despite Trump’s insistence that the country’s nuclear capabilities were “totally obliterated” in limited airstrikes last year.
A majority of the people surveyed by CNN said they anticipate that a long-term military conflict between the U.S. and Iran is likely, a possibility Democrats are raising alarm about as they push for a vote on congressional war powers resolutions. Trump said Monday his administration had initially “projected four to five weeks” of conflict but had the capability to fight for longer, if necessary.
Support for the war also plummeted when Americans were posed with the possibility of gas prices rising due to the conflict. More than a third of Republicans polled by Reuters said they would be less likely to support continued attacks if oil or gas prices increased in the U.S., and 38 percent of registered voters polled by Morning Consult on Saturday said the U.S. should seek a diplomatic solution if the conflict leads to “significantly higher gas prices.”
That comes after oil prices jumped more than 10 percent Sunday after Tehran launched retaliatory attacks on several oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, which facilitates more than a fifth of the world’s waterborne crude oil transportation.
