Can Democrats Unite Against the War With Iran?

Since Donald Trump launched his regime change war against Iran over the weekend — reportedly at the urging of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with no real plan for what comes next — polls have already shown clear and overwhelming public opposition. 

One day after the strikes began, a survey from Reuters/Ipsos revealed that only about 1 in 4 Americans approved, while a plurality of 43% disapproved. Additionally, 56% said that Trump has been “too willing to use military force” to advance U.S. interests. The following day, CNN released another poll that found that almost 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s decision to attack Iran. 

It’s hard to overstate how brutal these numbers are for Trump, especially when compared to previous wars. In 2003, about 7 in 10 Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, according to a Gallup survey at the time. The Vietnam War — widely remembered today as the most unpopular military conflict in U.S. history — also received majority support from the American public at the beginning. Unlike those conflicts, public opposition to Trump’s reckless war of choice is already high and likely to grow as the conflict drags on and spirals further out of control, which now seems likely. As more American troops are killed in action and as the conflict starts to wreak havoc on the global economy, public disapproval will intensify and widen. 

This unpopularity of Trump’s illegal war should make it relatively easy for Democrats to forcefully oppose it — and, to their credit, many have, especially from the party’s progressive ranks. Yet the Democratic Party has been far from unified in its response thus far. Some have come out strongly against the attack, including the former vice president and 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who issued a strong statement on Saturday opposing regime change. Others have broken ranks entirely and offered a full-fledged endorsement of Trump’s reckless military campaign. Others have limited their criticism to process and procedure. 

The party’s leadership, in particular, has gone out of its way to avoid condemning the war outright or opposing the regime change agenda driving it. In a statement released shortly after the strikes, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., carefully avoided stating his actual position on the attack or the goal of regime change. Instead, he complained that the Trump administration had not provided Congress with “critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat” while imploring White House officials to “answer these vital questions.” 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., criticized the administration on similar procedural grounds, noting that the Constitution gives Congress “the sole power to declare war as the branch of government closest to the American people.” As if worried about being accused of dovishness on Iran, Jeffries went on to vehemently condemn the country’s government, calling it a “bad actor [that] must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region.” 

Both Schumer and Jeffries have since called for Congress to vote on a war powers resolution that would force all members to go on the record publicly whether they support or oppose Trump’s unilateral effort. Most Democrats now appear ready to vote for this largely symbolic measure; yet, before Trump made his fateful decision to bomb Iran, the party’s leadership had apparently worked to delay such a vote. As Aída Chávez of Capital and Empire reported several days before the first strikes, Jeffries and his team did little to whip votes for a House resolution on Iran that Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., put forward last year, while House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats “deliberately inflated” projected opposition to the measure “as part of a broader effort to dampen momentum.” 

This effort to block or delay a war resolution vote may have been part of a deliberate strategy to encourage Trump’s military intervention. According to an earlier report from Drop Site News, some congressional Democrats were actually eager to see Trump launch a military campaign against Iran, which they privately backed and also saw as politically advantageous. “The potential for fallout in the event of a regime change war is at the heart of the meek response from Democrats, who see Trump walking into a trap of his own making,” reported the authors. 

Schumer has reportedly led this strategy since last year, when he first attempted to goad Trump into military intervention against Iran, accusing the president of talking “tough in public” and then letting the “terrorist government of Iran” get “away with everything.” At that time, Drop Site reported, a “substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily,” but they also recognized how politically catastrophic it would be. This is “precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it.” 

The prediction that military intervention against Iran would be hugely unpopular with the American public was prescient, yet whether Democrats can now coalesce around a strong antiwar message remains to be seen, especially when so many in the party’s leadership appear unwilling to condemn the intervention outright. 

When Congress debated the Iraq invasion more than two decades ago, opposing the rush to war took genuine political courage. Looking back two decades later, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who voted against authorization, recalled a “fearsome national debate” and strong pressure from a public that overwhelmingly backed the Bush administration, in part because of its lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Today, the major obstacle to Democratic unity against the war is not popular opinion but the powerful influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which continues to hold considerable sway over senior party figures, including Jeffries and Schumer. Currently, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is working hard to ensure that the Democratic caucus remains divided when it comes to Iran and the genocide in Gaza. Through its super PAC, United Democracy Project, the group is spending millions on Democratic primaries across the country in an effort to kneecap progressives and bolster pro-Israel candidates.

This all comes at a time when support for Israel among the American public is at an all-time low. One day before Trump launched his war on Iran, Gallup published a poll showing that Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians (46%) than they do with Israelis (36%) for the first time since the organization began asking the question in 2002. (In 2018, by comparison, 64% sympathized more with Israelis and just 19% with Palestinians). A week earlier, Axios reported that the Democratic National Committee’s “autopsy” of the 2024 election, which top officials chose not to release last November, had concluded that Harris lost significant support due to her refusal to break from Joe Biden’s deferential approach to Israel on Gaza. 

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio more or less acknowledged that the U.S. launched its attack on Iran because the Israelis were about to launch their own attack. “There absolutely was an imminent threat,” said Rubio. “And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked [by Israel], and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to … sit there and absorb a blow before we respond.” 

More explicitly, Rubio explained that “we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action” that would “precipitate an attack against American forces.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., repeated this claim, noting that Israel was “determined to act” against Iran “with or without American support.”

While the administration has since tried to walk back this claim after critics seized on it as proof of Israeli influence, it is clear from other reporting that Netanyahu played a critical role in pushing the U.S. into yet another war in the Middle East. If Democrats are serious about opposing Trump’s disastrous foreign policy, they will have to start confronting the current influence of the pro-Israel lobby within their own ranks.