A majority of supporters of Donald Trump are against US military involvement in Israel’s conflict with Iran, a poll published Wednesday found, reflecting a growing Republican backlash to the president’s threats to utilize American firepower.
A wide ranging Economist/YouGov poll conducted over the weekend revealed that 53% of voters who backed Trump in the 2024 presidential election do not want the country to join in Israel’s strikes.
It reinforces a long-held public appetite for a peaceful resolution to the objective of forcing Iran to give up its ambitions of acquiring nuclear weapons. A Chicago Council on Global Affairs-Ipsos survey in April found eight in 10 Americans favored diplomatic steps or tightening economic sanctions to limit Iran’s further nuclear enrichment.
The poll published Wednesday, reported by the foreign policy think tank Responsible Statecraft, comes as an increasing number of Republican politicians and Trump allies express their opposition to the prospect of the president involving US forces without the approval of Congress.
“This is not our war. But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution,” Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican representative, wrote on X on Monday, adding his voice to the pursuit of a bipartisan House war powers resolution to try to curb Trump’s authority.
On Wednesday, Tim Burchett, a Republican representative form Tennessee, told CNN he wants to see “very little” US involvement in the escalating Middle East conflict, which has witnessed Israel and Iran trading missile barrages for several days.
“We don’t need another endless war in the Middle East. Old men make decisions and young men die, and that’s the history of war,” he said.
“We need to take a deep breath and slow down this thing and let the Israelis do their thing. We do not need a three-front war in our lifetime.”
Their views mirror those of Trump’s voters surveyed in the Economist poll, which revealed that only 19% of them favored the US getting involved militarily, and 63% wanted the administration to “engage in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program”.
Among all voters, 60% agreed that the US should step back from involving its military.
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Previous polls have consistently shown that diplomacy and negotiations, leading to a new, binding nuclear agreement by which Iran halts nuclear weapons production, is the public’s preferred solution.
Even if diplomacy or economic sanctions failed, the Ipsos poll showed, Americans favored stepping up action short of military engagement. Six out of 10 respondents said they would support the US conducting cyberattacks against Iranian computer systems, while only 48% would support airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
In a Gallup poll published last year, 77% said they considered the development of nuclear weapons by Iran as a “critical threat” to the security of the US, but as subsequent surveys showed, there is no matching appetite for the use of the US military to counter it.
