There is No MAGA Split on Iran

And other ways the media misleads you.

“MAGA is Split,” Bloomberg News tells us. “Will MAGA forgive Trump’s ‘betrayal”?” The Week asks.

According to the Associated Press, “cracks” have appeared in “Trump’s MAGA base” over the war in Iran. “Some MAGA voices warn Iran backlash will only grow the longer the war lasts,” ABC News adds.

These articles — and others like them across the mainstream media — all take the same basic shape. They all mention Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two former Fox News hosts who have now remade themselves as anti-war crusaders in independent media. Several name-drop Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene as well. As a counterweight, Laura Loomer, a MAGA activist who supports the war, is frequently invoked.

One thing none of these articles include: Any actual data showing whether MAGA Republicans are as divided as the authors claim.

The Bloomberg piece quotes Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a libertarian Trump critic, giving a guess of how MAGA Republicans break down on the war question: “MAGA is split right now,” Massie says. “I think I have half of MAGA, and I think the president has the other half.” But there is no hard data included. Bloomberg simply takes the anti-war MAGA ideologues at their word that they are aligned with a large faction (maybe even half) of the movement.

This would be an understandable choice if there wasn’t any hard data available to test their claims. But there is. And Massie and Carlson and Kelly — and, by extension, Bloomberg and ABC News and the AP, who wrote headlines premised on their claims — are wrong. There is no meaningful MAGA split on Iran.

Since the war started 11 days ago, pollsters at NBC, CNN, and YouGov have tested this question, and they all found the same thing. The war in Iran is unpopular, but that is the case because of opposition from a supermajority of Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a sliver of Republicans — and the Republicans who are opposed overwhelmingly come from the ranks of those who don’t identify with the MAGA movement, not those who do.

Here’s a look at GOP support and opposition for the Iran strikes in each of the three surveys:

Among all Republicans: 77% support, 15% oppose (NBC); 77% support, 23% oppose (CNN); 76% support, 15% oppose (YouGov)

Among Republicans who don’t identify as “MAGA Republicans”: 54% support, 36% oppose (NBC); 61% support, 39% oppose (CNN); 63% support, 21% oppose (YouGov)

Among only Republicans who identify as “MAGA Republicans”: 90% support, 5% oppose (NBC); 88% support, 13% oppose (CNN); 85% support, 5% oppose (YouGov)

A group that is “split” approximately 85%-5% isn’t really split at all. To the degree there is actual Republican opposition to the war among voters — and, let’s be clear, there is very little — it comes from the exact opposite sort of Republicans you’d expect from reading all the stories about Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

How each partisan group comes down on support of the Iran strike in three recent polls. Is the “MAGA split on Iran” in the room with us? (Chart by Wake Up To Politics)

What does it mean to be MAGA?

So, what’s going on here? I think these results tell us something about our political environment and something about the media environment. Let’s do the political point first.

There have been attempts by some intellectual thought leaders on the right to backfill a coherent ideological philosophy into “MAGA” (which always seem to align perfectly with the philosophy these activists already had. Weird how that works out, isn’t it?) But it is pretty clear that, for most voters who identify with MAGA on the ground, MAGA = Trump.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! This wouldn’t be the first time that a group of voters have aligned themselves in allegiance to a particular political leader, just as there were “Reagan Republicans” or “Obama Democrats.” But it’s clear from the polling data that “MAGA Republicans” should be seen much more in line with these personality-driven labels than as an ideological one.

I think a lot of the failings in the media coverage come from this disconnect: treating MAGA as a distinct ideological identity (on the order of “democratic socialist” or “neoconservative”) rather than as a personality label (effectively, when someone says they are MAGA, they are just saying they are a “Trump Republican” who largely aligns themselves in accordance with Trump the person, not a clear set of ideals).

This is clear from polling on a range of topics, not just Iran. Here is a chart from YouGov that shows approval of various Trump policies among MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans. The only real difference is that MAGA Republicans basically approve of everything Trump is doing (with approval of his individual policies ranging from 86% to 94%, and giving him an overall approval rating of 97%), while non-MAGA Republicans are much more mixed (with their approval rating of Trump policies ranging from 57% to 87%, giving him an overall approval rating of 72%).

A Politico poll in November found that these differences also extend to how voters understand their own economic situation: 52% of MAGA Republicans felt their personal financial situation has improved over the past five years, compared to 37% of non-MAGA Republicans. 73% of MAGA Republicans expect their personal financial situation to improve in the next five years, compared to 57% of non-MAGA Republicans. 49% of MAGA Republicans feel better off than the average American, compared to 30% of non-MAGA Republicans.

It is unlikely that there is truly such a delta between MAGA Republicans’ and non-MAGA Republicans’ economic situations. Rather, this should be seen as an extension of what we know: Democratic and Republican partisans judge the economy more based on who is in the White House than based on their actual economic situation. When a president they support is in charge, they assume the economy is doing well and trust that the president will keep making it better. When the opposing party is in charge, they feel the opposite. See this chart from Gallup showing that Democrats immediately felt better about the economy as soon as the clock struck 2021, and then immediately felt worse in 2025, and the exact opposite for Republicans.

Friends, entire national economies don’t shift in a day. This is about partisanship controlling.

But not 100% of Democrats and Republicans change their minds like this on a dime, of course. Rather, it’s the strong partisans who do so — and there are plenty of examples of strongly partisan Democrats and strongly partisan Republicans changing their policy beliefs to match their party leaders. MAGA Republicans, then, should be understood as the current iteration of strong Republican partisans, at least for as long as Donald Trump and the Republican Party are synonymous.

There is no indication that affiliating with MAGA means that one agrees with a specific philosophy on foreign policy, or economics, or anything else, as some ideological entrepreneurs would have you believe. It just means that someone really, really trusts Donald Trump, just like strong Democratic partisans trusted Joe Biden.

So while it’s clear that there is a subset of Republicans who oppose the Iran war, if you’re looking for them in the MAGA movement, you’re looking in the wrong place. The Steve Bannon types — voters who self-identify as MAGA and oppose the war — exist, but they are a really small group once you venture outside the world of influencers and podcast hosts. Bannon speaks for ~5% of the MAGA movement.

Instead, the ~15% of Republicans who oppose the war (still not a very large number) hail from the non-MAGA strain of the party.

To engage in some speculation of my own, I would guess that these GOP war opponents are much more Joe Rogan listeners than Steve Bannon listeners. Rogan has also called the war “insane,” but he would hardly identify himself as a MAGA acolyte — nor would he identify as a Republican, but when we use him as a representation for the Republicans who oppose the war, we’re thinking of his listeners who identify as Republicans.

These would mostly be younger men. Like Rogan, they wouldn’t be MAGA Bannonites: they’d be newcomers to the Trump fold from the last election, Johnny-come-latelys to the Republican Party who experimented with Trumpism in 2024 and are now mixed on its results.

Indeed, opposition to the war skews younger, while membership in the MAGA movement skews older (about half of the movement is over 65, according to one study). When you think of MAGA, it’s probably more accurate to think of a Fox News viewer 65 or older who is strongly committed to the Republican Party; the younger, more heterodox Tucker Carlson viewers clearly make up a small segment of the movement.

Non-MAGA Republicans, meanwhile, are probably a mix of “never Trump” Republicans and Republican newcomers who supported Trump in 2024 and now call themselves Republicans, but aren’t as strongly tied to the party. (My guess is that the anti-war faction of the GOP more comes from the latter group of non-MAGA Republicans than the former group, based on the fact that you might expect some of the “never Trump” neocons to back the war out of previous ideological commitments — think John Bolton. But there are likely some of these pre-Trump conservatives mixed in as well.)

But MAGA = Trump, and anyone telling you that the little Republican opposition that does exist to the war comes from MAGA voters is misleading you. As CNN put it, reporting on the results of their poll:

Within the Republican Party, there is a sharp divide between those who say they consider themselves part of the “Make America Great Again” movement and those who do not, a division that appears largely linked to trust in the president. MAGA Republicans are 30 points more likely than non-MAGA Republicans to say they strongly approve of the decision to take military action, 34 points likelier to say it will reduce the threat Iran poses to the US and nearly 50 points more likely to say they have a great deal of trust in Trump to make the right decisions about US use of force in Iran.

Politically, as I’ve written, this is an important reality to be aware of. If MAGA voters are mostly marked by their trust in Donald Trump, it means you should be skeptical of any actors claiming that there is a “MAGA split” or that “MAGA voters are drifting away from Trump.” It also means that guesses at “the future of the MAGA movement” are probably fruitless, since there are no clear ideological attachments that come with being a MAGA Republican. That makes it more likely that the movement will fall apart once Trump exits the White House, since it is so tied to him personally and not a set of ideas that a successor could run with.

As Trump said back in January: “MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”

Instead, to the degree there are drifters in Trump’s coalition, the ones to watch are probably not MAGA diehards who are Trumpier than Trump. They are likely young men who experimented with Trumpism in 2024 but now, unlike most MAGA Republicans, actually are concerned with the state of economy and have misgivings about Trump’s handling of the war and other issues. (Most of these voters are probably Independents, but it stands to reason that some would now identify as Republicans in polls.)

This is a good-news, bad-news thing for Trump. Good news: Polls show that he is right when he says, “I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” referring to Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.

Bad news, to the degree he cares about these things: It seems as though Trump has failed to build an ideological movement that will be able to outlast him (because his movement is much more personalist than philosophical) or a political coalition that the GOP will be able to count on going forward (because he has alienated some of the young male voters who drifted into the party in 2024 by breaking his promises on foreign policy and inflation). Yes, it’s true these anti-war Republicans drifters are small in number (only about 15% of the party, and fewer if you subtract the “never Trump” types). But that was a crucial 15% to the GOP’s victory in 2024 that the party won’t be happy to see go — and potentially could have kept in their fold in a no-tariff, no-war alternative reality.

The real media bias

Now, the media point.

How did so many media outlets allow themselves to get snookered by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon?

The same way that various youth activists managed to persuade media outlets that climate change, Israel/Palestine, and student loans are important issues to young voters, despite the fact that young voters ranked those, on average, as 11th, 14th, and 15th, respectively, when asked to rank 15 issues by their importance, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. (Inflation took 1st place, just like it does for the population at large.)

And the same way that some Hispanic activists convinced the Democratic Party during the Biden era that Hispanic voters wanted looser border security, even though 76% of Hispanic voters viewed the “large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. at the border with Mexico” as a “crisis” or “major problem” in a Pew poll at the time. (This is basically indistinguishable from the 78% of non-Hispanic voters who said the same.)

And the same way that some Black activists gave the impression that a large percentage of Black voters around the same time supported defunding the police, something that only 28% of Black voters supported in a March 2021 poll. (That number was 18% for voters overall.)

Activists routinely try to give the impression that they speak for identity groups that they belong to, and media outlets routinely fall for it, giving outsized coverage to youth activists concerned about climate change, and Hispanic activists wanting a looser border — and, yes, MAGA Republicans opposed to the war — even though these activists often represent only tiny segments of the groups they claim to represent.

This is because, more than being biased to the left or right, the media is biased towards conflict: Young voters upset with Biden about climate, or MAGA voters upset with Trump about Iran make for juicy, conflict-driven stories. Never mind whether or not they’re true. The media is also biased towards high engagement voters: journalists ourselves are highly engaged with politics, and often so are our peer groups, and our audiences, and our sources.

This means we try to capture the perspective of youth voters by covering a youth-led protest, or MAGA voters by talking to a MAGA media figure, even if this gives us nothing approaching a representative sample of the group in question. Polls are not perfect, but they are the best thing we have to capture what large groups of Americans are thinking in a rigorous, empirical way. If journalists spent more time immersing themselves in the data, and less time taking the word of highly engaged activists with ideological agendas, you would have fewer stories falsely claiming that there is a MAGA split on Iran, when the data tells us there very much is not.

Frankly, you would probably have fewer articles suggesting in either direction that the act of striking Iran itself will have much political impact one way or the other. Journalists, the sources we talk to, and our highly engaged audiences are interested in foreign policy, but the American public largely isn’t. (Even after the war broke out, national security and foreign policy only combined to be listed as the most important issue by 10% of voters in a recent poll, compared to 49% of voters who said either inflation, jobs, or health care.) Journalists should still report on foreign policy, of course — but we should be honest about the ways it will or won’t impact politics.

In this case, Trump is unlikely to be helped by a success about Iran and unlikely to be hurt by any Tucker Carlson-esque opposition to striking Iran on its own terms, although of course the economic fallout of the war can still be highly damaging to him. This is a less alluring story than the idea of an ideological split within Trump’s base, but it is the truth.

I’ll leave you with this. Of the polls I cited above, YouGov gives the most detailed crosstab information, so we’ll use their data for a moment.

According to the YouGov poll, MAGA Republicans were “split” 85%-5% on whether they supported the Iran strike; non-MAGA Republicans were split 63%-21%. In the same poll, 66% of Republicans said they were MAGA Republicans. 21% of Republicans said they were not. This allows us to create a breakdown of the party at large:

Data by YouGov. Chart by Wake Up To Politics.

The majority of Republicans are either MAGA supporters (think: Trump) or non-MAGA supporters (think: John Thune or John Bolton) of the Iran strikes.

4% of Republicans are non-MAGA critics of the strikes (think Joe Rogan-listening Republicans, or neocons who are suspicious of Trump like New York Times columnist David French pictured in this category above). 3% of Republicans are MAGA critics of the strike, like Carlson or Bannon.

It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion that’s shared by only 3% or 4% of your party (which, of course, is an even smaller percentage of the country); in fact, there can be great honor in that. There’s also nothing wrong with journalists telling people about the opinions of the three- or four-percenters.

But think about media coverage of the Republican response to the Iran strikes. Has it been proportional to the numbers above? Every time you see a news article quoting Tucker Carlson, or read a column by David French, you should remember that you are hearing from people who speak for roughly 3 or 4% of the Republican Party. They may represent more than that in terms of People Journalists Know or Talk To or Find Interesting, but they don’t represent many real voters according to the data.

Of course, there are many Independents who don’t support the war as well, including some who likely fall in the Rogan-listener, young-male category. But it’s important to get our terms straight. This does not represent the long-awaited (in some circles) Republican abandonment of Trump, and certainly not a fracture of his MAGA base. Those are different voters entirely who are unhappy, who do have an important electoral role to play but are not longtime adherents of the Trump movement, as the media coverage makes them seem to be.

That does suggest Trump has a problem with a critical group of Independents. But the rumors of a MAGA split with Trump have been greatly, greatly exaggerated — by ideological actors who have an interest in making it seem that way, and members of the media who went along with it in search of a good story.