Compare and contrast:
I’m sure MAGA will buy that this orange freak in a baseball hat is a super genius. Will the rest of the country?
Dan Pfeiffer suggests that this operation isn’t going to result in the usual rally round the flag reaction:
Traditionally, military action has led to a spike in a president’s approval rating. Both Presidents Bush saw their numbers soar to a gobsmacking 90 percent after the Gulf War and 9/11, respectively. Now, a handful of military strikes in Iran is not akin to invading Iraq or responding to the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. However, Barack Obama’s approval rating rose by about nine points after the operation to kill Osama bin Laden.
This is a very fluid and dangerous situation. We don’t know how Iran will respond or what happens next. But there are several reasons to believe that bombing Iran won’t help Trump’s approval ratings.
First, the so-called “rally around the flag” effect has diminished with every subsequent president. America has become much more polarized, which means there are fewer and fewer voters willing to say they approve of a president they didn’t vote for.
Second, the American people do not want U.S. military action against Iran. In the latest Economist/YouGov poll, only 16% of Americans support U.S. involvement in the conflict between Iran and Israel.
Third, an approval bump usually requires consolidating one’s base. That’s not what this did. Military action in Iran has divided the Republican base. While it’s mostly bullshit, Trump has sold himself as an isolationist who wants to pull the U.S. out of foreign entanglements. In the Economist poll, a majority of Republicans oppose the action Trump just took.
Finally, Trump’s numbers are down because a bunch of people who voted for him in 2024 have buyer’s remorse — and most of that regret is rooted in the economy. It’s hard to see voters who are mad at Trump about tariffs or tax cuts for the rich coming back to him because he’s put us on the brink of another misbegotten war in the Middle East.
He points out that Trump’s numbers go down when he’s in the news:
His polling dips line up with three news cycles — the intense focus on DOGE cuts, the tariffs, and more recently, the deployment of troops to Los Angeles to combat the protests.
This makes intuitive sense. The electorate can be divided by news consumption. The first group consumes political news voraciously — they watch cable news, listen to political podcasts, and subscribe to national news outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. By definition, this group includes everyone reading this newsletter; it is overwhelmingly college-educated, more Democratic than Republican, and almost every one of them is a fully committed partisan.
The other group pays very little attention to politics and news. They see some political content on social media, but do not actively seek it out or opt into the ongoing political conversation that dominates most of our lives. Because they primarily get their political news from social media, they only see content when a story breaks out of the political news bubble and goes viral among the broader public. The three storylines I mentioned above are instances where political news truly went viral and started reaching non-political news consumers. When they heard things about Trump, his approval ratings began to drop.
This finding is a reminder to all Democrats to be as loud as possible at all times; and it’s a reminder that our target audience is not the people we encounter on X.
He goes on to point out that immigration is NOT a winner for Trump and that it’s also good for Democrats to keep the heat on that issue:
Immigration is Trump’s best issue, but that doesn’t mean it performs well for him. Once again using Nate Silver’s model, Trump is nearly four points under water on immigration.
The L.A. protests weren’t a winner for him either, despite all the Democratic handwringing about Real Americans hving a fit over alleged “violent protesters.” He points to this from G. Elliot Morris:
The Trump administration is underwater in 11 out of 12 poll questions related to immigration, deportations, and the LA protests this week. The only poll to come up with positive results for the administration is a YouGov/Economist survey asking whether people approve, broadly, of how Trump is “handling the issue of immigration.” At +4, that represents a 3-point decline from the +7 reading in YouGov’s poll last week.
Pfeiffer suggests that by sending in the marines, Trump broke through to the voters who are usually not paying attention.
I assume that people will hear that we’ve gone to war with iran. Many of them won’t know the difference between Iran and Iraq and may think we’re back at war with the latter. Others won’t have a clue. But they may not be thrilled about the wholoe thing because we’ve now had about 15 years of “no more wars.”
Maybe…