Polls show ‘undecided’in the lead

One new poll on the nuclear deal has been added this week and shows that more Americans have no opinion on whether the deal should be approved than either support or oppose the deal.

The results suggest that Americans are hearing the very loud debate between President Obama and Republicans but are unsure how to react.

Both of the latest two polls show 20+ percent supporting the deal, 30+ percent opposed to it and 40+ percent with no opinion.

Congress must vote on the agreement before September 17.

One poll published this week by iMediaEthics took a different tack.  Rather than asking if people supported or opposed the deal, respondents were asked what the purpose of the nuclear agreement is.  Only 25 percent correctly answered that it was intended to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Another 11 percent said it was to authorize Iran to possess a limited number of nuclear weapons while 9 percent said it was to allow Iran to use US technology to build nuclear power plants.  The remaining 55 percent said they didn’t know what the agreement was about.

This suggested to some that no more than 25 percent of the US public was competent to express an opinion.

In Tehran, PressTV, the English language arm of state broadcasting, asked its website users to give their view of the deal.  This was not a scientific poll since it allowed respondents to choose themselves, not to mention that they could vote as often as they wished.  PressTV said it got 24,853 responses with 42 percent saying the United States and its allies would violate the agreement, 40 percent saying the agreement would be successful and 18 percent saying it would be killed by the US Congress and Zionist lobby in the United States.  Respondents were not given the option of saying the Islamic Republic might violate the agreement!

Here are the six US polls taken since the agreement was reached last month showing the margin of support (a plus mark) or the margin of opposition (a minus mark) in the last column.  The position getting the largest response in each poll is bold-faced.

Support      Oppose       Silent         Margin

Monmouth U.      27                  32              41                –  5

Jul 30-Aug 2

CBS News             20                 33                47               -13

Jul 29-Aug 2

NBC/WSJ             35                  33                32             + 2

Jul 26-30

CNN/ORC            44                  52                  5              –  8

Jul 22-26

Pew                        38                  48                 14              -10

Jul 14-20

ABC/WaPost       56                   37                  7               +19

Jul 16-19