Will Iran break MAGA?

So far, there’s not much erosion in Trump’s polling among Republicans. But elite opinion can trickle down to the party base.

Tucker Carlson conducts an interview with Trump on Oct. 31, 2024 in Phoenix. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

In early 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “Inlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” He mused that invading Iraq “may have been the worst decision” in presidential history and said that Hillary Clinton had bad judgment. “Look at the war in Iraq, if you look at what she did with Libya, which was a total catastrophe.”¹ This dovish rhetoric put Trump at odds with members of the more hawkish Republican establishment like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

Fast forward eight years, and Trump once again ran against “forever wars” and sending American soldiers to fight abroad in 2024. But those were no longer fringe positions in the GOP. A meaningful share of the Republican establishment was fully behind MAGA-style isolationism. JD Vance — somewhat of a standard-bearer on the anti-interventionist right — was Trump’s VP pick. On the media side of things, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes spoke to different parts of the Republican base about the dangers of foreign entanglement, as did prominent members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Of course, there’s still a more hawkish contingent of Republican elites. But that didn’t stop the Trump campaign from running with an anti-war message. Compared to something like immigration, the party is well and truly split on the value of international military action.

Stephen Miller@StephenM

Liz Cheney will be Kamala’s defense secretary. She will draft your children to fight wars in the Middle East, Russia and Asia. All Americans — including Muslim communities across Michigan — must vote for Trump to stop World War III.

4:44 PM · Nov 1, 2024 · 49.3K Views

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138 Replies · 1.15K Reposts · 2.91K Likes

Trump, who is much less ideologically consistent than the true interventionist or anti-interventionist members of the GOP, has the final say in these disputes at the moment. He’s so far swung toward the Rubio side of the party during his second term, capturing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and most recently starting a war with Iran.

So how has each wing of the Republican Party reacted to our latest international foray? Here’s Sen. Lindsey Graham for the hawks: “The end of the largest state sponsor of terrorism is upon us. God bless President Trump, our military and our allies in Israel.” He’s not alone. There are increasing signals that Republican donors prefer Rubio to Vance in 2028, which means that Nate might get to look smart for picking Rubio in our recent 2028 Republican primary “draft”.²

But Carlson called the Iran strikes “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Fuentes has gone even further, encouraging his followers to boycott the 2026 midterms or even vote Democrat in response to Iran and other issues. Joe Rogan has referred to the Iran War as “insane”.³ “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars, and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it,” he recently said.

So far, MAGA voters remain highly loyal to Trump

So if there’s ever going to be an issue that causes a meaningful number of Republican voters to break with Trump, Iran seems like a top candidate. (Plus, the increase in gas prices has so far been slightly higher in red states like Florida.) It’s easy enough to imagine a world where the more isolationist members of Trump’s MAGA base oppose the foreign military action, while it’s supported by older, more traditional members of the GOP. That would be a reversal from the usual way things break for Trump — for example, on an issue like tariffs.

To level-set, the war in Iran is not popular with Americans in general. Support for the strikes and approval of Trump’s approach to Iran are underwater in nearly every poll conducted since the start of the war, and the Iran War is less popular than other foreign conflicts were at their outset.⁴ To put some numbers to that, we averaged every Iran poll conducted since February 27. The war is opposed by 50 percent of Americans and supported by 40 percent.⁵

It’s a different story for Republicans, 77 percent of whom support the war, on average. But that’s exactly what we’d expect for almost any Trump policy. Take the Venezuela strikes: Republicans were always more supportive of that operation than Democrats or independents. And Republican support only increased over time, especially after Maduro was captured. (That’s not inherently a dig at Republicans; Democrats also tend to overwhelmingly approve of the actions of Democratic presidents.)

The real question is whether you see more Republican defections on Iran than you do on other salient topics that don’t touch on the isolationism question. To answer that, let’s compare Republican approval of the Iran War to some crosstab averages of Trump’s approval on salient issues like immigration and inflation, plus his overall job approval rating.⁶

At first glance, there’s not much evidence of a larger-than-average split in the GOP. The share of Republicans who disapprove of the Iran War (13 percent) is on the low end compared to issues like tariffs (20 percent) and inflation (22 percent). However, the share of Republicans who approve of the Iran War is also lower than Trump’s approval rating on the economy and immigration. That’s partially because more voters answer “don’t know” or “no opinion” on questions about Iran — which is pretty resonable for such a recent event.

To avoid that problem, we can look at Republicans’ net approval of these issues. It’s also worth comparing those numbers to Trump’s net approval rating among all Americans. If Iran is causing a larger-than-average break among Republican voters, the gap between Republican support for the war and support among all Americans should be smaller than expected.

On average, Trump’s Republican advantage across his job approval rating and the four issues we track is +78 — meaning his net approval among Republicans is 78 percentage points higher than his net approval rating among all Americans. In comparison, it’s just +74 points for the Iran conflict: -11 net support overall compared to +63 among Republicans.

So, the Iran War is about 4 points less popular among Republicans than you’d expect, given its overall popularity. Still, that’s not yet a big difference. So why, when so many high-profile MAGA isolationists are opposed to the war, is the backlash among Republican voters so muted?

In large part, it’s because the Republican voters you’d expect to be most opposed to the war (at least ideologically) are actually the most supportive. Some pollsters release crosstabs for Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement. How they identify those voters varies — YouGov, for example, asks “Are you a MAGA supporter?” — so comparing these groups across different polls isn’t exactly apples to apples.

But in this case, the results are highly consistent: Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement are much more supportive of the war than Republicans in general. For example, RMG Research found that a group they call “Trump-policy voters” favored the US attack on Iran by a margin of +75, compared to just +35 among “traditional GOP voters.” Similarly, net support for using military force to overthrow the government of Iran is +68 among MAGA Republicans compared to just +11 among non-MAGA, according to YouGov.

That’s the opposite of what you’d expect ideologically, but it partially comes down to ambiguity about how voters self-identify as MAGA. Does MAGA mean voters who are extra Trumpy in a literal sense of tending to support everything that Trump does? Or do voters see the term as a stand-in for populist, anti-establishment conservatism of the sort you might associate with Carlson or Greene?

In practice, it’s probably the former. Across the board, Republican voters who identify with the MAGA movement tend to be more supportive of everything Trump does.

But this also looks like a case where elite opinion could serve as a leading indicator of mass Republican opinion. The isolationist turn among a meaningful number of Republican policymakers is relatively recent, and that sort of change can take a while to filter down to the broader party.

What can we learn from Democrats?

Democrats provide an imperfect analogy for various reasons. There’s no singular figure in the Democratic Party that has anywhere near the personality-cult-type gravity of Trump; in fact, when you poll them, Democrats have no idea who their party leaders are. And despite the Democratic base’s angry mood, the party’s college-dominated coalition still tends to have far more respect for elite and expert opinion. Potential 2028 candidates like Gavin Newsom have cleverly exploited the situation by promising to fight back harder against Trump, while also running as trustworthy “electable” brands and without really challenging any of the party’s ideological commitments. (And James Talarico was probably the more establishment-friendly candidate in the Texas Democratic Senate primary, although that’s a complicated case.⁷)

But still, take Gaza. For years, there was a contingent of progressive Democrats who were skeptical of Israel and AIPAC, and made support for Palestine an important part of their campaigns. But that was a minority position among both elected Democrats and Democratic voters. Over time, however, the entrance of younger voters and politicians into the party, combined with the war in Gaza, has made these positions much more mainstream. According to Gallup, 65 percent of Democrats now say their sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis.

The equilibrium could change as Trump looks more like a lame duck

The same thing could easily happen with Iran for Republicans. In the short term, support among all voters will probably depend on whether the war results in additional US casualties or fuel prices continue to rise.

But keep in mind that Trump is increasingly a lame duck. When he leaves office, it’s reasonably likely that the next generation of Republican leaders will be more ideologically committed to MAGA-style isolationism.

In 2008, with Bush deeply into lame-duck territory, eventual nominee John McCain repudiated Bush’s handling of Iraq but stopped short of conceding that the original idea to go to war had been a bad one. But as 2028 approaches, there could be a sharper break. Republican-affiliated elites like Carlson⁸ may skate where they see the puck as going, figuring that the cost of crossing Trump diminishes over time while positioning for 2028 becomes more important. Combined with younger voters’ antipathy to foreign entanglements, the base’s appetite for isolationism could look closer to Carlson’s view⁹ than to the old guard of Bush-era Republicans. And perhaps, even, there will be a cohort of MAGA-identified voters who think that Trump isn’t MAGA enough.

1. Of course, Trump’s past support for the Iraq war was the subject of frequent fact-checking in 2016.

2. Although to be fair, Nate also thought that Rubio was a smart pick in 2016.

3. Nate jumping in here. As a language pendant, I’ve been interested to track how various news sources refer to the war. With no clear endgame in sight, it pretty clearly is a war and not just an “incursion” or an “operation”. But is it the capital “I”, capital “W” Iran War? The New York Times is using the capitalized version of “Iran War” in its headlines, and that’s good enough for me, even if Wikipedia disagrees. –NS

4. Specifically, the war is underwater in every survey except a Fox News poll that showed it exactly 50/50.

5. Exact question wording varies from poll to poll. Some ask about the attacks on Iran or military action in Iran. Others ask whether Americans approve of how Trump is handling the situation with Iran.

6. Specifically, we averaged approval among Republicans in the 10 most influential polls included in the Silver Bulletin database that released crosstabs.

7. Jasmine Crockett received her share of establishment backing too, like from Kamala Harris.

8. More semantics here. Carlson, even if he styles himself otherwise, is an “elite” both according to the political science definition of “party elite” (i.e. an influential member of the party coalition) and the common definition: he’s worth a lot of money and has worked for lots of mainstream news outlets. -NS

9. Note that Carlson initially supported the Iraq War, but later recanted that support.