Much has been made of the ideological split in the Republican Party since President Donald Trump ordered strikes against Iran, but there is also a generation gap.

Younger voters have been among the most skeptical of military intervention in the Middle East generally and against Iran specifically. Trump supporters have not been immune to this trend. The MAGA personalities who have split with Trump over Iran have tended, with some prominent exceptions, to skew younger, while old-line conservatives have largely held firm behind him.

Trump’s appeal to young men last year was driven by his opposition to the “forever wars” and frequent criticism of how the Middle East was handled by presidents of both parties since 2001. 

However, Trump has also been adamant that Iran should not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. He pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal during his first term, but attempted to negotiate a new one in his second term. The stalling of negotiations led to Trump’s support for the Israeli strikes against Iran, and then the United States’s strike against three of Tehran’s nuclear sites.

Republican pollster Brent Buchanan found that 62% of voters over the age of 55 support Israel’s war with Iran, compared to just 40% of those under 55. 30% of voters under 55 support providing weapons to Israel.

“There’s a huge generational split over war,” Buchanan said in a memo circulated on Monday.

Older voters will remember the Iranian hostage crisis and hostility from the ayatollahs since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Younger voters’ perceptions are shaped more by the lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were never found, and the country quickly descended into chaos that took years of U.S. involvement to resolve partially. At the same time, Afghanistan fell back under Taliban control virtually the moment the 20-year U.S. military presence concluded.

On the Left, the youngest voters may also have been influenced by the anti-Israel protests that have erupted on college campuses after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Israeli military incursion into Gaza in response to that atrocity. 

A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that just 14% of respondents aged 18 to 29 mainly sympathized with the Israeli people in the conflict with the Palestinians. That number was 47% among those aged 65 and up. Republicans in the 18-to-29 camp were barely more pro-Israel than Democratic senior citizens.

Polling on U.S. military strikes on Iran, most of which were conducted before the Trump-ordered actions over the weekend, has been all over the place. The results often depend on the precise wording of the poll questions.

WHAT TRUMP HAS IN COMMON WITH PAST PRESIDENTS AS HE PONDERS IRAN 

It is possible that the Trump administration will avoid an escalatory spiral that would make the Iran strikes a lasting political matter. Iranian retaliation, directed at a U.S. military base in Qatar, was widely viewed as symbolic. Trump thanked the Iranians for their advance notice and said it was time to move toward peace.

Either way, a generation gap will likely persist on matters of war and peace.