Only one in three Americans say they support the war in Iran, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, marking the weakest level of backing for the conflict since its opening days five months ago.
The survey also found that most respondents believe President Donald Trump has not clearly explained what the United States is trying to accomplish, a warning sign for the White House as the war drags on and voters grow more restless.
The poll, conducted from Friday through Sunday, showed Trump’s overall approval rating rising to 37%, up three points from last month, when his rating had tied the lowest point of his presidency.
That small bump is good news for Trump, but the Iran numbers are much rougher, especially with gasoline prices rising and Americans once again watching Washington spend its time on foreign battlefields while kitchen table costs bite at home.
Trump has described several goals for the conflict, including helping Iranians remove their rulers, destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and stopping Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Still, Reuters found that 69% of Americans, including four in 10 Republicans, believe Trump has not “clearly explained the goals of U.S. military involvement in Iran.”
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales pushed back on the idea that Trump should govern by poll numbers, saying the president will not base national security decisions on “fluid opinion polls.”
“What matters most to the American people is having a commander in chief who takes bold action to keep them safe,” Wales said.
That is the case the White House is trying to make, and it is not hard to understand why. Iran has spent decades exporting terror, threatening Israel, menacing U.S. forces and racing toward weapons capabilities that no sane commander in chief can ignore.
At the same time, voters who backed Trump because he promised to avoid endless conflicts are asking why this fight looks less like a quick strike and more like another open ended Washington project.
Support for the conflict has stayed below 40% since the United States and Israel launched strikes on February 28, a sharp contrast with the early phases of other major U.S. wars.
The Iraq War had support from about 70% of Americans in its first months, while the Afghanistan War opened with roughly 90% backing, according to Gallup polling.
Those comparisons are imperfect, because each conflict had its own trigger and context, but politically they show the size of the hole the administration must climb out of.
Trump has bristled at comparisons to wars like Vietnam, which lasted two decades and claimed more than 58,000 American service members, and he initially estimated the Iran war would last four to five weeks.
“It’s not clear why we started a war with them. I have no idea,” said Alex Womack, a retired turbine repair specialist from Stockbridge, Georgia.
Womack, a former Marine who served during the 1991 Gulf War, said he became a Republican partly because he admired how President George H.W. Bush handled that conflict.
Now, he says his support for Trump has faded because of Iran. “I don’t think he’s doing very well, personally,” he said.
So far, 18 American soldiers have died in the conflict, while thousands have been killed in Iran and in Lebanon, where Iran aligned fighters have battled Israeli forces.
The war has also hit Americans at the pump, with gasoline averaging just over $4 per gallon nationwide, up from around $3 before the February 28 strikes began.
“This puts pressure on the party in a myriad of ways, all of them bad,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political strategist and former White House spokesman under President George W. Bush.
“The White House officials have been saying since January that they need to win economic arguments. It’s hard to win the economic arguments when you’re clearly focused on foreign policy,” Conant added.
That political pressure is arriving just as Republicans prepare to defend narrow majorities in Congress during the November midterm elections.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found independent registered voters favoring Democratic congressional candidates over Republicans by 36% to 20%, and also giving Democrats an edge on economic policy.
That is exactly the kind of number that makes campaign operatives sweat, even if the Beltway polling class has been wrong before and will certainly be wrong again.
Independent voter Rhyan Anderson of Fairburn, Georgia, who supported Trump in 2024 after voting for Joe Biden in 2020, said the president should keep his focus closer to home.
“My biggest thing is just focus on the people who are actually in the country,” said Anderson, who works two jobs in security and data collection. “I know we have allies and things like that, but there’s a lot of people here that really need help.”
Reuters/Ipsos has asked about support for military strikes on Iran since the middle of March, when 37% said they supported the war.
On the first day of the conflict, 27% approved, while 29% chose unsure when given that option.
The latest survey was conducted online nationwide among 1,246 U.S. adults and carried a margin of error of three percentage points in either direction.
For Trump, the challenge is clear: keep Iran away from a nuclear weapon, protect American forces, avoid another forever war and explain the mission in a way that voters believe before the political clock runs out.
