On Foreign Policy, Party Divisions Become a Chasm, WSJ Poll Finds
New survey also finds little support for President Trump’s territorial expansion to include Canada, Greenland
Divisions between the two political parties over American foreign policy have grown into a chasm, Wall Street Journal polling shows, as Republican voters have increasingly turned against aid to Ukraine, free trade and international commitments.
The gaping difference shows in a new Wall Street Journal poll, which tested two competing statements about America’s foreign alliances. Some 81% of Republicans agreed that U.S. allies haven’t shouldered enough responsibility for their own defense and that the U.S. should stop using tax dollars to defend them. By contrast, 83% of Democrats agreed with an alternative statement that international alliances are a source of strength and should be supported with tax dollars.
The difference between the two parties follows years of Republicans taking an increasingly isolationist view of America’s role in the world, while Democrats continue to support international alliances.
In 2019, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 15 points separated the two parties when voters were asked whether the U.S. and its European allies benefit from security alliances among those nations. By 2023, the gap had grown to 30 points, with 80% of Democrats but only 50% of Republicans seeing a benefit.
In the new Journal survey, 83% of Democrats supported continuing U.S. financial aid to Ukraine for its defense against Russia, while 79% of Republicans opposed it. Throughout 2003 and 2004, Journal polling found that Democrats increasingly said the U.S. needed to do more to support Ukraine, while Republicans said the U.S. was already doing too much.
Among all voters in the new survey, 49% supported continuing aid to Ukraine, with 44% opposed.
In a rebuke to President Trump, the Journal survey found lopsided opposition to his ambitions for expanding U.S. territory to include Greenland and Canada, one of the president’s signature foreign policy goals.
Some 62% of voters said that Trump’s constant musing about expanding U.S. territory to include Greenland and Canada represented a bad idea. Only 25% said controlling those two places was a good idea and would boost national security and the American economy. The question didn’t reference Trump’s similar desires to control the Panama Canal or, at least temporarily, the Gaza Strip.
Among Republicans, 51% called Trump’s comments on territorial expansion a good idea, while 28% called them a bad idea—a far narrower majority than Republican voters offered for most of the president’s other policy proposals.
Generally, the survey findings echoed the positions of party leaders. Former President Joe Biden and Democrats staunchly supported the defense of Ukraine, often saying the U.S. would do so “as long as it takes.” Since coming to office, Trump, Vice President JD Vance and their allies have shown less interest in Kyiv’s plight, choosing to broker an end to the war with Russia instead of further assisting Ukraine in its defense.
“It is Democrats who are the champions of U.S. internationalism and multilateralism, including alliances,” said Dina Smeltz, a foreign-policy polling expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
In another example of the two parties’ differing orientations: 81% of Democrats in the new survey held a favorable view of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, compared with 31% of Republicans.
Republican skepticism of free trade surfaced when voters were asked whether tariffs help or hurt the U.S. economy. Some 77% of Republicans said tariffs help create U.S. jobs and are beneficial, while 93% of Democrats said they raise prices and are mostly a negative force. The survey was taken before the big stock market downturn of Thursday and Friday, which occurred after Trump announced the specifics of tariffs on most U.S. trading partners.
There were some clear bright spots for Trump in the foreign-policy polling.
A slight majority of Americans backed a significant reduction in foreign aid, 51% to 45%. Again, the results split sharply by party affiliation, with 92% of Republicans supporting cuts and 85% of Democrats opposing them.
Those results followed the dramatic shrinking of the U.S. Agency for International Development by Trump and Elon Musk, who has been leading the administration’s budget-cutting efforts. In recent years, the U.S. has spent about 1% of the federal budget on foreign assistance.
Asked about deporting illegal gang members to El Salvador, 62% said they were in favor while 32% were opposed. A majority supported the deportations even when the question asked whether suspected foreign gang members should be removed without a court hearing to prove their gang affiliation.
Last week, the Trump administration admitted that it, by mistake, sent a Maryland man suspected of MS13 gang ties to a dangerous prison in El Salvador, though Vance and other senior leaders continue to defend the decision.
The Wall Street Journal poll surveyed 1,500 registered voters by phone from March 27 through April 1, with some respondents reached by text and asked to take the survey online. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.