Two-thirds of voters support President Trump’s efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war, according to polling taken following Trump’s high-stakes meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this month.
The Harvard CAPS/Harris polling released Monday found 66 percent support Trump’s efforts to end the war — which has been raging for more than three years — and 52 percent of voters were satisfied with how Trump is managing negotiations.
The president has claimed the war wouldn’t have started if he’d been in the Oval Office, a point Putin agreed with during the pair’s recent bilateral summit in Alaska. Trump later met with Zelensky at the White House last week.
Fifty-seven percent of voters surveyed said Trump deserves “a lot of credit” for the meetings, regardless of whether he succeeds in halting the fighting.
Despite the support for Trump’s efforts, 6 in 10 respondents said they viewed the Putin meeting as unsuccessful in advancing peace, compared to roughly half who said the Zelensky talks were successful.
Fifty-eight percent of voters said they think the president hasn’t been tough enough on Putin, with voters largely rating Washington’s relationship with Kyiv as more important than its relationship with Moscow.
Roughly 6 in 10 voters said they don’t think Trump will ultimately be able to solve the Ukraine war.
Trump has made the case that he should win a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in talks to curtail the war in Europe and other global conflicts. While he has struggled to make progress on the Russia-Ukraine clash or Israel’s war in Gaza, he aided in ending conflict between India and Pakistan in May, and between Cambodia and Thailand last month.
The poll found 61 percent of voters do not think Trump should win a Nobel Prize for his work.
Roughly two-thirds of voters in the polling said Putin is “playing games and stalling,” and the same share said they think Zelensky genuinely wants to stop the war.
“The voters think Putin is playing the president but they nevertheless think that President Trump’s efforts are worthy of support — maybe not a Nobel prize yet — but he is getting some significant applause for trying to end a war that has killed more than a million people,” said Mark Penn, chair of the Harris Poll.
The poll was taken Aug. 20-21 among 2,025 registered voters by The Harris Poll and Harris X. The margin of error for the total sample is 2.2 percentage points.
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