Is the United States at war with Iran — and would that be popular? This is the question moderator Norm Ornstein posed to James Carville and Kristen Soltis Anderson Monday morning in the Amphitheater, opening both the 2025 Chautauqua Lecture Series and the Week One theme of “Themes of Transformation: Forces Shaping Our Tomorrow.”
Carville, longtime Democratic political consultant, and Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote and Republican pollster, came together to discuss recent foreign affairs, immigration and the futures of the Democratic and Republican parties. Ornstein, senior emeritus fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime Chautauqua program contributor, led the conversation, asking how the electorate is responding to each of the parties’ positions.
In response to Ornstein’s question about Iran, Anderson compared Chautauqua’s emphasis on dialogue to the polling results about the conflict in the Middle East. Chautauqua wants to be in conversation with both sides of an issue — it’s not interested in black and white. American voters are also largely in the gray area when it comes to approval for action in Iran.
“I am seeing an electorate that has a lot of different, possibly contradictory, views all at once,” Anderson said.
Americans’ responses often come down to how a polling question is phrased. Anderson’s polling occurred days before the United States hit three nuclear sites in Iran. In the lead up before the event, Israel had attacked Iranian nuclear and military sites, and Iran had retaliated. President Donald Trump was considering whether the United States should get involved. Amidst this blooming tension, Anderson gave polling participants four options from which to choose:
1. Don’t get involved at all
2. Get involved, but only diplomatically
3. Get involved diplomatically to help Israel defend itself
4. Going in and engaging in offensive military tactics
“Only 8% of our respondents chose that latter option,” she said. “Even among Republicans, it was closer to maybe 15% but still not a lot.”
With results like this, Anderson said it would make sense for people to assume that Americans are against the United States’ Saturday strike on Iran. However, that result doesn’t tell the whole story.
Another question posed was for respondents to choose between two statements: “Iran developing a nuclear weapon would present an existential threat to the United States and therefore justifies action,” or “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a cause for concern but does not justify the United States going and getting involved in the Middle East.”
“On that question, a majority of Americans chose the first option,” Anderson said.
To see a negative polling response to Trump authorizing the strike, Anderson believes negative consequences would need to arise from it.
She compared Trump to putting dish soap into an oily pan — everything immediately spreads away from it, reflecting how people go to either one side or the other with Trump.
“All of a sudden people go, ‘Well, Donald Trump did it, so therefore, I must hate it or I must love it,’ sort of regardless of how nuanced their views may have been before Donald Trump took action,” she said.
Ultimately, Anderson concluded that Trump’s coalition, particularly Republicans in office, will rally around him for this issue, although the broader electorate feels more mixed.
To corroborate Anderson’s dish soap metaphor, Ornstein brought up U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who had previously spoken out against going to war without Congress’ approval; however, she was in favor of the attack on Iran after it happened.
On the other hand, Ornstein said, Republicans like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have spoken out against the attack.
“Most elected Republicans aren’t interested in getting crosswise with Donald Trump,” Anderson said. “He is the more powerful figure in the party than any of them with the vast majority of their voters.”
Ornstein shifted to ask Carville, a longtime political consultant who played a crucial role in getting former President Bill Clinton elected, his thoughts on Iran and how Democrats are responding.
Carville said that the players in this are “an 86-year-old bag of crap” and “the prime minister of Israel, who if he is telling the truth about this, it’s the first time he told the truth about anything in this century.”
He brought up an article in which U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s Supreme Leader had suspended the nuclear weapons program in 2003.
“Now, Trump says he doesn’t believe her. All right, so why do we have intelligence there?” Carville said.
Carville highlighted how Americans’ tax dollars go to fund defense intelligence that Trump doesn’t believe is credible.
“(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu talked Trump into doing this,” Carville said. “If I told you I have a pit in my stomach about this, I have a pit in my stomach about it.”
Ornstein asked Anderson if the attack on Iran were to escalate to an attack on American soil, would there be a “rally around the flag” moment, similar to what occurred after 9/11?
Anderson replied that, barring a massive attack, she sees the current conflict as a less damaging issue for Trump than the economy currently is.
“People are not necessarily seeing the cost of living going down. That issue was first and foremost in the news, and you began to see his numbers go down,” Anderson said. “This topic shift could lead to a stabilization.”
Seeing if negative consequences arise from U.S. involvement in Iran will be crucial in determining long-term polling impact, Anderson emphasized. If people feel that the world is less safe because of the U.S. strike on Iran, that could lead to lower approval numbers for Trump.
One issue that polled well for Trump during the 2024 election cycle was his stance on immigration. Ornstein asked Carville if those numbers will also shift if people see members of their community arrested and deported. Ornstein referenced a video of ICE agents brutally arresting landscaper Narciso Barranco outside of an IHOP — all three of Barranco’s sons are U.S. marines.
“Americans do not dislike immigrants,” Carville said. “… People do not like disorder. They reject disorder.”
Carville cited former President Joe Biden’s shift to the left on immigration — which led to disorder on the southern border — and how a Democrat was not elected president in 2024, as examples of how the electorate does not want disorder in the United States. Ornstein countered, mentioning that a number of members of the Democratic Party still want a more expansive policy for allowing more immigration.
“My definition of a political party is first and foremost, who are the people that vote in this primary? Is it the academic institutions, the museums, the press?” Carville said. “… The Democrats have never nominated the most-left candidate ever. And they are not going to do that in 2028.”
He emphasized that progressive liberals constitute a small sect of the Democratic Party.
“Sixty-five percent of the Republican Party believes that Jan. 6 was a tourist visit. There is a difference between being an idiot and being a criminal,” he said.
Ornstein then asked Anderson about the polling impacts of ICE arrests, as those arrests impact more communities. Anderson still sees this as a politically strong area for Trump. Recalling a focus group she held in Michigan, Anderson shared an interaction with a young, non-white swing voter.
“He said, ‘I hear these stories about someone coming here and getting put up in a hotel in Manhattan. When is someone going to start looking out for someone like me?’” Anderson said. “He sensed the politicians and frankly, especially the politicians of the Democratic Party, were interested in looking out for people who had not done the right thing, people who had not worked hard and played by the rules, and they were the ones getting pushed to the front of line.”
The messaging around Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris being “for them and not for you” helped clinch people’s perspectives that they were not being treated fairly. With that said, Anderson discussed how that does not mean people are completely for deportation.
“If I asked voters in general, ‘Do you think someone here illegally should be deported?’ The vast majority would say yes. Should you deport someone who has been here 15 years? Suddenly, (those numbers) go down a lot,” Anderson said.
Perceived fairness is also a factor in other political issues, too. Ornstein brought up how student loan forgiveness was an unpopular issue for Democrats because of such a perception. Additionally, tariffs disproportionately affect the working class, and the “Big, Beautiful Bill” would cut Medicaid to provide tax cuts for the wealthy.
“Donald Trump was elected to do two things,” Anderson said, “to make the cost of living more affordable and bring about order and stability people felt were lacking. They had looked at the Biden presidency and felt like the control room had been empty for four years and said we need someone back in there who will do things. That’s why even though Trump is not who you think of for a lack of chaos, he was still nevertheless able to grab on to that attribute.”
With Trump’s falling approval rates on the economy, Anderson said that this could be an issue for him moving forward if he doesn’t address costs of everyday goods.
Ornstein asked Carville how Democrats should respond to economic issues to bring more people into the fold, noting that many people in red states would be negatively impacted by tariffs and cuts to Medicaid.
“I have had people come up to me and said, ‘How does it feel to be a moderate Democrat?’ I said I have no idea. I am a liberal democrat through and through,” Carville said. “I would rather stick safety pins under my thumbnails than to give rich people a tax cut.”
Where he does diverge from liberal Democrats is on student loans. He gave a fictional example of two students named Jack and Jill. Both are strong students, but Jack decides to go to Cornell because it’s an elite institution, and Jill decides to go to the University at Buffalo to save money. Jack graduates from college with $250,000 in debt, while Jill graduates with no debt because she also worked in the cafeteria during college.
“Jack says, ‘Hey, Jill, why don’t you give me something and pay my debt down?’ Well, you should have thought about that before you did it. To me, you signed a contract. You are a kid with a 3.85 average (GPA). You have a 33 ACT. You are 18 years old. You know what a contract is,” Carville said.
Another area in which he splits from leftist Democrats is on language. When Carville was watching a focus group in Western Kentucky in the late 1980s, a pollster asked if they thought ignorance or apathy was the biggest problem.
“Lady, we don’t know,” one of the focus group members had said, “and we don’t give a …”
The person had ended their statement with an expletive; Carville used the coarseness to make a point.
“You have to communicate with people in a language that they understand and they speak to each other,” Carville said. “What certain Democrats have embraced is this idea that if we use complex sentences and big words, then people will think we’re smart and then people will trust us. Think about that. That’s pretty stupid, isn’t it?”
For the final question, Ornstein asked Anderson and Carville about young voters and voters of color: Did either think those voters would stay in the Republican Party? Or could the Democrats do something to win them back?
With Anderson’s experience in polling millennial and Gen Z voters, evidenced by her 2015 book The Selfie Vote, Ornstein was curious if she saw the Republicans as hanging onto the voters they had collected from the Democrats in previous elections.
Anderson sees Republicans as borrowing the youth vote, especially if Republicans don’t continue with economically populist and isolationist values. She saw Trump actually use ideas she had posited in her book to reach young voters.
“He showed up in media where young people were getting their news in a way Republicans had trailed a decade ago. We caught up and exceeded the Democrats and took a more isolationist approach and did in some ways make a slight pivot on some of the social and culture issues. while becoming strongly conservative on others,” she said.
The results of Trump’s run of podcast appearances and presence on social media were clear: He did better with younger voters than any Republican nominee had since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004.
Carville didn’t view the Democrats as having as much of an issue with working class and non-white voters as the Democrats do with male voters.
“We get killed with males. We get slaughtered. Race doesn’t matter. White males, non-white males, Asian males, Hispanic males. I don’t care. We run significantly behind, and I think that is a little bit part of a messaging problem,” he said.
The way to message better — talk about cuts to veterans’ affairs.
“A country that won’t keep its promises to veterans,” Carville said, “won’t keep its promise to you. I promise you.”
