Methodology
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, with the support of Ammara Elsevier and Ria Mueller. YouGov distributed the survey online to a sample of 1,000 voting-age adults in the United States between August 11 and August 14, 2026.
A nationally representative sample in the United States was surveyed, and statistically significant findings are reported with a margin of error +/- 3.64 percentage points. The report uses “America” and “American” to describe survey takers in the United States.
Results in this survey are presented as percentages of the sample, rounded to the nearest whole number.
Whenever reference is made in this report to a “significant” or “statistically significant” relationship, significance is established beyond the 95% confidence level. Graphics included in the report are summary statistics or cross-tabulations.
Party identification is measured on a seven-point scale. Democrats and Republicans combine respondents who identified as “strong” or “not very strong” partisans with Independents who said they lean toward that party. Independents are those who lean toward neither. Respondents who answered “not sure” are included in the overall figures but not in the party breakdowns. This “partisans plus leaners” definition is the same one used in our April 2026 report, so the two surveys can be compared directly.
To achieve these representative samples, YouGov fielded surveys that used a sample matching approach. YouGov sent targeted email invitations to panelists based on their pre-profiled demographic characteristics. To match survey participants to the population frame, more than 1,000 interviews were collected in order to achieve the targeted sample. For matching and weighting, YouGov used a population frame with demographic benchmarks derived from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The final sample respondents were the closest matches to the population frame based on gender, age, education, and race. Matched interviews were then weighted using propensity and were further post-stratified using the joint stratification of those same variables as well as vote choice for the most recent national elections.
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. Recruiting methods include web advertising campaigns (public surveys), permission-based email campaigns, partner-sponsored solicitations, and SMS-to-web recruitment (voter registration-based sampling).
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. For context, the survey was in the field during a period of time (August 11–14, 2026) in which the Iran war was in its sixth month; news broke that President Donald Trump had been secretly flown out of July’s NATO summit in Turkey on a military jet because of an Iranian assassination threat; an earthquake in Colombia killed hundreds of people; and the June memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was days from its August 17 expiration.
