A new Drop Site/Zeteo/Data For Progress survey also finds likely American voters are split on whether Trump is more responsive to the American people or to Israel.

 There has been no shortage of surveys of the American public’s attitude toward the war on Iran, and the polls have all found broadly the same dynamic: Democrats are strongly opposed, independents lean against, and Republicans are broadly supportive.

But all of this polling, done by reputable survey companies and paid for by mainstream media outlets, has conspicuously avoiding asking tough questions about the motivations behind the war. Or, at least, we found it conspicuous.

Nobody, for instance, has surveyed the American public to ask them whether they believe this war is being fought in the interests of the American public or on behalf of Israel. And nobody has asked whether Trump launched the war to distract the public from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Indeed, anybody at an American news organization who even suggested asking such questions would at best never be invited back to the Zoom call, and more likely would find their key card no longer working at the front desk.

Doing sophisticated polling that follows best practices is an expensive endeavor, which is why it’s usually left to major media with major budgets. But thanks to the generous support of our readers, we decided it’s something we can afford, too, and we teamed up with our friends at Zeteo to split the costs of a national survey of likely American voters, one that allowed us to ask the kinds of questions we’re interested in, and that we believe you’ll be interested in too.

We hope to do more of these in the future, particularly if there’s reader interest. In fact, one way we gauge that is by looking at how many readers decide to become donors or paying subscribers after reading a particular article.

A majority of likely American voters believe that Donald Trump launched the war on Iran at least in part to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that had engulfed his presidency, according to a new survey.

The survey found that a solid 52-40 majority of voters agreed with the statement, with the other 8% saying they were unsure as to his motivations. The findings will come as little surprise to a public that has morphed Trump’s codename for the war, Operation Epic Fury, into “Operation Epstein Fury.”

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The belief that Trump is trying to knock Epstein off the front pages by going to war with Iran is most strongly held, unsurprisingly, by Democrats, who agree with the statement by an 81-14 margin. For those under 45, it is approaching an article of faith, with a 66%-26% majority agreeing with the idea. But even a quarter of Republicans told pollsters Trump launched the war as a distraction from Epstein.

The survey of 1,272 likely voters, using a national web panel of respondents, was conducted from March 6 to March 8 by Data for Progress, and paid for by Drop Site News and Zeteo. We put the survey into the field in order to be able to ask the American people the kind of questions mainstream news organizations shy away from. The precise wording of the questions can be found here, with breakdowns among party, race, gender, and age.

The public’s belief that Trump waged the ongoing war to distract from the Epstein scandal was branded as antisemitic this week by the Anti-Defamation League and the Washington Post, which said the viral claim owed its popularity to a “pro-Iran propaganda network.”

“Pretty quickly after the conflict began, this conspiratorial rebranding of Operation Epic Fury into ‘Operation Epstein Fury’ started circulating on social media platforms,” Oren Segal, the ADL’s “senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence,” told the Post. An ADL report said the phrase “Epstein Fury” has been mentioned more than 90,000 times by roughly 60,000 accounts. The Post did not explain why it was antisemitic to believe that Trump launched the war to distract from the Epstein scandal beyond noting that Epstein was Jewish.

The Post recently laid off its entire Middle East team. Nevertheless, according to the Post, Iranians are trying to undermine American support for the war by linking it to Epstein. “To erode public support for the joint U.S.-Israel military operation, Iranian state media has sought to portray those countries’ leaders as part of a corrupt and depraved ‘Epstein class’ or ‘Epstein regime,’” the paper reported, claiming that the “the message is spreading through generically named ‘news’ accounts” shilling for Iran. The term “Epstein class” was in fact first used by American Democratic politicians such as Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, and Rep. Ro Khanna, who is not.

Israel’s Influence

The survey also probed the question of Israeli influence over Trump’s decisionmaking. Americans were split over the question of Trump’s loyalty, with 47% saying he is more responsive to the American people than to Israel, and 46% saying he was more responsive to Israel.

Among independents, a crucial voting block that swung the election to Trump, half—50-44%—said that Trump prioritizes Israeli interests over Americans’. Among Republicans, 17% said the same. Democrats overwhelmingly held that view, 75-17%.

Asked if the Trump administration was pursuing its war with Iran “primarily for American interests” or “primarily for Israeli interest,” the public was also divided, but half—50-41%—said that he was considering America first. Another 9% said they didn’t know.

Still, no president has ever gone into war with 41% of the country convinced he was doing so on behalf of a foreign country, putting Trump and Israel’s war in uncharted territory.

Electoral Backlash

The survey found that Americans are sour on it, with 55% saying they disapproved; among those 39% said they strongly disapproved, while just 42% approved. This result is in line with other polls on the war.

Overwhelmingly, voters believe the war will make their lives worse. The survey was in the field before the wild volatility in the oil market, but even then, 49% of voters said the war “will make my life more difficult” compared to just 10% who said they’d see an improvement. One third said it would have no impact.

More pressing for Washington, however, may be the public’s attitude toward politicians and candidates who support the war or support emergency supplemental funding for the war, which Trump has requested. The survey asked whether voters would be more likely or less likely to vote for a congressional candidate in 2026 or a presidential candidate in 2028 if they support the war or support new war funding.

For Democratic voters, the question is existential. A candidate who supports the war will be badly punished by primary voters in the 2026 congressional elections, with voters saying they’d be 79% less likely to support them, a number that held roughly the same for 2028 presidential candidates.

Republicans, however, would be more likely to support a pro-war candidate by a net 39 points, with only 20% saying it would make them less likely to back the candidate for president.

In the general election, this means voters would be less likely to support a congressional candidate by 19 points; roughly the same result holds for candidates who vote for war spending. Among presidential candidates, the number is negative 19.