How Trump’s War on Iran Is Hastening the Coming MAGA Crack-Up |
How Trump’s War on Iran Is Hastening the Coming MAGA Crack-Up
Another Middle East war is exactly what the young voters and voters of color who flocked to Trump in 2024 did not sign up for.
Congratulations are in order for Donald Trump: His attack on Iran is the most unpopular American war in modern history. The New York Times compared support for Trump’s war with initial support for nine other wars going back to World War II, and found Trump’s adventure at the very bottom. The Times has support for it at 41 percent. Other calculations find support in the high 30s.
This is heartening. It suggests the American public is far less reflexively disposed to accepting the case for war than in the past, as I’ve argued. But here’s a different reason this matters: It may deliver another blow to the idea that Trump’s 2024 win produced a national realignment.
The war, it turns out, is particularly unpopular among some of the voter groups that Trump won over—young and nonwhite working class voters—the ones who gave rise to that oft-proclaimed “realignment thesis.”
The numbers are striking. This week’s Quinnipiac poll finds that only 40 percent of voters support the war on Iran versus 53 percent who oppose it. I asked Quinnipiac for a demographic breakdown:
Among voters aged 18 to 34, only 21 percent support the war with Iran, versus 71 percent who oppose it.
Among nonwhite voters without a college degree, only 21 percent support the war, versus 69 percent who oppose it.
Meanwhile, young voters say by 58 percent to 21 percent that Trump has made American leadership in the world “weaker” and not “stronger.” Nonwhite noncollege voters say the same by 62-23.
Just after Trump’s 2024 victory, a ubiquitous interpretation held that those gains among young and nonwhite working class voters represented a generationally defining shift in American politics. A new “multiethnic, working-class party” was born. But events have undercut the thesis. Trump has lost enormous ground among those very voters due to the same persistent high prices that drove them to him, suggesting they never underwent any serious ideological transformation.
Separately, the spike in positive views of immigration and the massive backlash to ICE—especially among young........