A new poll showed that 70% of Americans support renegotiating and strengthening the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and having the resulting deal approved by Congress instead of implementing it as an executive agreement, as former President Obama did in 2015, The Hill reported Monday.
A majority of those polled supported these positions across party lines. Overall, the Harvard-Harris survey showed that 85% of Republicans, 71% of independents and even 57% of Democrats thought that the deal should be modified and submitted to the Senate for approval.
Additionally, 60% of those polled thought that the deal was bad and two thirds did not believe that Iran was complying with the terms of the accord. Half of the Democrats surveyed did not believe that Iran is observing the terms of the deal.
Of those surveyed, 81% think that the deal should be treated as a treaty requiring a two thirds vote in the Senate.
“Americans see Iran as a bad actor on all fronts and substantial majorities believe this agreement is being violated and never should have gone into effect without a Senate vote,” said Mark Penn, a co-director of Harvard-Harris and former adviser to both President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. “The polling certainly raises questions about the strategy of some Democrats to attack Trump when he attacks Iran or North Korea, two regimes universally despised by Americans.”
Polling in 2015 showed strong public disapproval of the deal and the way it was implemented, and surveys consistently showed that Americans favored Congressional review of the deal. Even among those who supported the deal, 74% wanted a Senate vote on the deal instead of a filibuster, which shut down the vote.
Ahead of the filibuster, a Pew Research poll on September 8, 2015 indicated that just 21% of Americans supported the deal, and 49% opposed it.
In August 2015, a CNN poll found that 56% of Americans wanted Congress to reject the deal, while a few days later, a Quinnipiac University poll revealed that voters in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida opposed the deal by a 2-1 margin.
[Photo: CCTV+ / YouTube]