[Salon] New poll on Ukraine War finds signs of public fatigue and increasingly partisan attitudes

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

From: Shibley Telhami, University of Maryland Sadat Office  May 24, 2022

Dear Colleague,

I’m pleased to share with you the results of our latest Critical Issues Poll, conducted with my colleague Professor Stella Rouse, which probed American public attitudes on the Ukraine War. We found that majorities of the public are still prepared to pay a price in increased oil costs and rising inflation – but that this preparedness has measurably diminished since our last poll in late March, suggesting some public fatigue.

In this poll, we also divided our large sample of 2091 into two subsamples to measure the impact of partisanship on attitudes, as well as to probe the apparent disconnect between support for imposing a no-fly zone (NFZ) over Ukraine and expressed public fear of direct confrontation with Russia. Both yielded striking results: The public is far less supportive of NFZ when information about the risk of confrontation with Russia is included in the introduction than when it is omitted:

In the second experiment, we divided the sample into two subsamples, one referring to “U.S. actions”, the other referring to “Biden administration” actions, which generated markedly different responses to the same actions undertaken by the U.S. government over the war, especially among Republicans.