May 26, 2018
How do Americans feel about withdrawing from the nuclear deal with Iran? The answer isn’t all that simple. It depends a lot on how the poll question is worded.
During May, seven respected polling organizations took polls among Americans on the Iran deal. Two found huge support for staying in the deal, three found modest support for staying in the deal, two ended in a tie and two found small pluralities opposed to staying in the deal.
The polls ranged from a 34-point margin of support for the deal to an 8-point margin of opposition.
The accompanying chart shows the results of the seven polls. The last poll was taken after President Trump announced his decision.
How surveys are worded can have a major impact on the outcome of polls. That’s especially true when pollsters ask people to weigh in on issues they may not have given much thought to previously. One of the eight polls asked the public if the US should leave the deal “or don’t you know enough about it to say?” In that poll, support for the deal was evenly split 21-21, but a huge majority of 57 percent said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion. While in the other polls, people volunteered they were unsure, no other poll specifically asked people if they were unsure. That suggests many of the people telling the other pollsters the US should stay in or get out didn’t really have a firm opinion.
The wording of some poll questions can drive respondents in one direction or another. Most Americans, for instance, tend to distrust Iran — in one recent survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans called Iran unfriendly or an enemy. Therefore, some people may be more inclined to think unfavorably if asked only whether they support an agreement with Iran while others may think favorably of the agreement when they’re explicitly informed (or reminded) that its objective is to prevent Iran from manufacturing weapons.
The last poll on the chart sought to measure that impact. First, it asked if respondents approved or disapproved of Trump’s decision. That produced a 35-35 tie with 30 percent unsure. The pollsters then asked half of those polled if they approved or disapproved of the deal “with Iran,” and the other half if they approved or disapproved of the deal “aimed at preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.” Asked about a deal to keep nukes out of Iran’s hands, respondents by a margin of 10 points supported the deal. Asked simply about a nuclear agreement with much-disliked Iran, those polled opposed the deal by a margin of two points.
Partisan cues matter as well, with people tending to back policies supported by their political allies. In all three HuffPost/YouGov questions—the last three on the table—Trump voters were opposed to the Iran deal, while voters who backed Hillary Clinton in the last election supported it. The gap between the two camps grew significantly after they were reminded that Trump had just decided to withdraw from the agreement.
There’s not necessarily a “correct” amount of context for a survey to provide. But just because polls on a specific topic are highly divergent doesn’t make them uninformative. Rather, that’s a pretty good sign that opinions on an issue still happen to be pretty malleable.
As other questions on the HuffPost/YouGov poll also found, the majority of the public isn’t deeply tuned into the debate over the nuclear agreement. Just 36 percent of Americans said they’d heard a lot about Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal, while 40 percent had heard only a little, and 24 percent said they’d heard nothing at all. And asked directly whether they had any strong feelings about the Iran deal, only 41 percent said they did.
The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported on the last poll question, which is the last line of our table. IRNA told its readers that “only 35 percent of Americans approve of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal.” IRNA did not, however, tell its readers that an equal 35 percent disapproved.