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Poll: Solid Majority Now Supports Congressional Troop Deadline

March 26th, 2007
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

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And now here’s yet another milestone in the southwardly heading polls on the Iraq war: a new Pew Research Center poll finds a “solid majority” of Americans now favor a Congressional deadline to get troops out of Iraq.

The net results of this poll are likely to be:

  • A further emboldening of Democrats to continue to press the issue and repeatedly bring up a deadline for troop withdrawal, even if the measure is defeated by GOPers or vetoed by President George Bush.
  • A further softening of overt Republican Congressional support for the war, particularly as election time draws near. With polls that show the continued erosion of not just the war in general but the administration’s open-ended timetable, watch for Republicans to seek find ways to show their independence from a White House beset by many crises on many fronts.
  • The continued isolation of the Bush administration due to it battling Congress, the press and (slowly but surely) members of its own party on several controversial issues.

    • There is a tiny glimmer of good news in this poll for the White House, but not much:

    A solid majority of Americans say they want their congressional representative to support a bill calling for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by August 2008. Nearly six-in-ten (59%) say they would like to see their representative vote for such legislation, compared with just 33% who want their representative to oppose it.

    Democrats are united in their support of legislation calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal by August 2008, and most independents (61%) also favor this step. Most Republicans oppose this step, but there are substantial divisions within the GOP. More than four-in-ten moderate and liberal Republicans (44%) want their representative to vote for legislation calling for an August 2008 deadline for a troop withdrawal, compared with only about a quarter of conservative Republicans (26%).

    And the good news?

    Even as the public registers strong support for a congressional deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces, there has been a modest rise in optimism about conditions in Iraq. Four-in-ten Americans say that the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going very or fairly well, up 10 points from February, when positive perceptions reached an all-time low. The shift has come disproportionately among Republicans (up 16 points), though independents and Democrats also are more positive about the situation in Iraq than they were in February (up 10 and nine points, respectively).

    So Americans are a bit more optimistic in general — but they want a timetable.

    The problem for the administration: it has and is adamantly rejecting any talk of even a non-binding timetable. So the war will HAVE to go well for its political fortunes — and the political fortunes of the Republican party — to rebound since Americans increasingly do not want an open-ended war.



    This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Iraq, George W. Bush, War, Polls, Foreign Affairs, Military, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

     
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