On Thursday, MSNOW aired a segment in which North Carolina voters expressed their “angst” over the war with Iran and its resulting economic consequences. According to one self-proclaimed supporter of President Donald Trump, she hails from an entire family of Trump voters who have been “disillusioned” by his performance.
The segment aired during a panel on the war, in which journalist Molly Jong-Fast noted, “Politico had a poll that came out yesterday, and it showed that 1 in 5 self-identified MAGA voters wants this war over today.” Here host Antonia Hylton suggested that Trump has attempted to “rhetorically work his way out of accountability on this,” raising his recent claim that while “voters are stressed about gas prices,” “they’re not unsupportive of the war.” But in the North Carolina voters interviewed by MSNOW contradicted the president’s assertion.
“My opinion on the war,” said one woman: “It’s an unnecessary war that should never have taken place.”
Asked whether the war’s growing $37.5 billion cost could have been better spent elsewhere, another respondent declared, “Roads, schools, lower prices, anything but this.”
And one noticeably upset woman delivered a response indicative of MAGA’s rising frustration at the situation. Asked if the war had helped her life at all, she shook her head and said, “No. For one thing, it causes me angst. Makes me angry. I’m very disillusioned. My entire family is disillusioned. And we are and were Trump supporters.”
Republican strategist Susan del Percio wasn’t surprised by this reaction. As she explained, with previous “forever wars,” the American public was at least sold on why it was happening in the first place. But in the case of Iran, “We entered this war for no reason that Trump can properly explain.” What’s more, “When we look at gas prices[,] they went up, they went up, went up, they ticked down. We never see gas prices go up, go up, tick down and then tick back up so quickly, which tells the American public that this war is directly in correlation.”
As Jong-Fast noted, new polling shows that just a third of self-proclaimed MAGA voters think the war is worth the economic costs, which is a steep 13-point drop since May, when Trump had the support of more than half of MAGA. Hot on its heels was another poll by Fox News, which revealed such disastrous numbers for the president that one leading political reporter called it the “end days for GOP.”
According to Fox, “If the election were today, 53 percent of voters would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 46 percent the Republican. That 7-point edge is just outside the poll’s margin of error. Democrats were up by 5 points in April. Notably, 53 percent is the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.” What’s more, the poll found that “Trump’s job approval remains near a record low, more Democrats are motivated to vote, Republicans join Democrats and independents in rating the economy negatively, and 4 in 10 voters want ‘dramatic’ or ‘revolutionary’ change.”