Methodology and Acknowledgements

The Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group developed and commissioned this survey as part of its Independent America program, which explores how US foreign policy could better be tailored to new global realities and to the preferences of American voters. Jonathan Guyer, Lucas Robinson, Eloise Cassier, and Ransom Miller wrote the survey instrument and analyzed and interpreted the findings.

This survey builds on Independent America research fielded in 2023, 2024, and 2025, retaining these surveys’ core thematic coverage of US military spending, war powers, Trump’s traits, and the Cuba embargo. Several items were revised for this wave, including split-sample wording experiments, the addition of “not sure” response options, and shift from a seven-point to a three-point political party identification scale. Modified items are flagged in the report’s endnotes and appears in the methodological appendix. Any modification that doesn’t support direct longitudinal comparison is identified within the charts.

Sample and fielding

YouGov distributed the custom survey online to a sample of 1,000 adults in the United States between April 24 and April 27, 2026. The full sample has a margin of error of ± 3.62 percentage points.

YouGov sources respondents from its opt-in survey panel, composed of over 1 million US residents who agreed to participate in YouGov’s online surveys. Panel members are recruited using multiple methods to help ensure diversity in the panel population, including web advertising campaigns (public surveys), permission-based email campaigns, partner-sponsored solicitations, and SMS-to-web recruitment (voter registration-based sampling).

To achieve a representative sample YouGov used a sample matching approach. YouGov sent targeted email invitations to panelists based on their pre-profiled demographic characteristics, and more than 1,000 interviews were collected in order to match the targeted sample to the population frame. For matching and weighting, YouGov used a population frame with demographic benchmarks derived from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Final sample respondents were the closest matches to the population frame based on gender, age, education, and race. Matched interviews were weighted using propensity scores based on a function including gender, age, education, race, region, and home ownership. Results were then post-stratified 2024 presidential vote choice, gender, age, race, and education.

Conventions

Results are presented as percentages of the sample, rounded to the nearest whole number. More precise data are available in the crosstabs, where percentages are rounded to the nearest 100th. References made in this report to a “significant” or “statistically significant” relationship denote significance beyond the 95% confidence level. Graphics and charts included in IGA’s reports and articles are summary statistics or cross-tabulations.

The report uses “America” and “American” to describe survey takers in the United States.

Sources and benchmarks

The instrument combines original IGA items with questions adapted from prior surveys conducted by Independent America and established public opinion instruments, including Pew Research Center, Gallup, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, American National Election Studies, and AP-NORC. The Iran battery was inspired by and loosely sequenced to follow different works developed by Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler’s casualty-tolerance framework, with targeting and escalation items drawing on Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino’s work on morality and nuclear use, and war-goals items informed by Bruce Jentleson’s “principal policy objective” framework on support for the use of force.

Question wording and changes from prior surveys

Prior surveys measured partisanship using a 3-point variable composed of respondents who self-identified as Republican, Democrat, or Independent — a grouping in which partisan leaners were classified with pure independents. This year’s report uses a more granular 7-point scale, where Democrats and Republicans are composites of respondents who identified as “strong,” “not very strong,” or leaning toward a party. To ensure consistency across trended comparisons, all partisan groupings in this report have been standardized to the “partisans plus partisan leaners” definition.

In this year’s survey “Not sure” was provided to respondents upfront. Past year surveys utilized a “show on skip” feature, in which “Not sure” was provided as an answer only when survey takers attempted to skip a question. For longitudinal comparisons, “Not sure” responses were filtered and removed across years. Readers should note that answers reflecting a preference for the status quo — including “Not sure” and  “maintain” — may be influenced by this change.

Full question wording, response options, randomization, and skip logic are available in the topline and crosstabs PDFs accompanying this report. Items modified from prior Independent America waves are in endnotes with previous wording. Readers should keep these notes in mind when comparing findings in this report with those reported in previous years.

Fielding context

This survey was fielded during the third week of the Iran war ceasefire (April 24–27). The United States and Iran were both blockading the Strait of Hormuz; Trump abruptly canceled his advisors’ planned trip to Pakistan for negotiations with Iran; and an assassin attempted to kill the president during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. As with any public opinion survey, news consumption of current events might have a short-term effect on respondents’ views, but the attitudes and opinions expressed in our survey are likely as durable as those in any survey.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to IGA CEO Mark Hannah and development and operations associate Sasha Benke. Thank you to IGA intern Anuva Wardah. A special thank you to Annie Luz Gugliotta for her design talents. Thank you to Kate Brown, Andrew Claster, Jeffrey Friedman, Craig Kafura, Andrew Payne, and Jeremy Shapiro, who read early versions of the survey instrument.

The findings and interpretations presented in this report are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute for Global Affairs. Any errors or omissions are our own.