{"id":57190,"date":"2026-01-16T11:13:45","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T19:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=57190"},"modified":"2026-01-17T04:38:37","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T12:38:37","slug":"do-iranians-overwhelmingly-oppose-the-regime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/16\/do-iranians-overwhelmingly-oppose-the-regime\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Iranians Overwhelmingly Oppose the Regime?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The impression you get listening to US politicians talk about Iran is that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime. Mike Waltz says<\/a>, \u201cThe people of Iran want freedom.\u201d Ted Cruz says<\/a>, \u201cthe people of Iran want to stand with America\u201d and \u201cthey want to stand with freedom.\u201d Newt Gingrich says<\/a>, \u201cthe overwhelming majority of Iranians want freedom and would reject the regime in a fair election.\u201d Is this really true?<\/p>\n

One source of evidence is the waves<\/a> of protests that have racked the country, including the latest wave in which more than 2,000 people may have died. Drawing inferences about public opinion from protests is common, yet it is fraught with difficulty.<\/p>\n

Whenever there\u2019s a large protest movement in Britain or the US, supporters of the movement will claim the protests show that \u201cthe people\u201d want whatever it is that they<\/em> want. But this is often not the case. For example, the largest ever<\/a> single-day protest in the US was the \u201cNo Kings\u201d rally on 18 October, when several million Americans took to the streets. Does this show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose Trump? No. It merely shows that some liberals and Democrats strongly oppose him.<\/p>\n

Likewise, there were numerous anti-lockdown protests<\/a> in Britain during the pandemic, despite lockdown being extremely popular<\/a> with the public. In this case, protests were an inverse indicator of the majority\u2019s preference. So while protests in Iran obviously reflect some level of opposition to the regime, they do not prove that such opposition is overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Another source of evidence that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime is polling<\/a> by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN). The Tony Blair Institute cites<\/a> a GAMAAN poll from 2022 in which a large majority of respondents described themselves as \u201cproponents of regime change\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, GAMAAN\u2019s methodology is highly questionable<\/a> and has been criticized by other Iran scholars and the respected pollster Pew Research<\/a>. Rather than using traditional probability sampling, GAMAAN distributes its surveys via social media and Psiphon VPN<\/a> (software designed to circumvent Internet censorship). As a result, its samples are unlikely to be representative of the Iranian population, with dissidents being heavily oversampled.<\/p>\n

By way of illustration, GAMAAN reported in a 2020 survey<\/a> that fully one third of Iranians were \u201catheists\u201d, \u201chumanists\u201d or people with \u201cno religion\u201d. Yet when Iran took part<\/a> in the World Values Survey that year, only 4% of respondents said that religion was \u201cnot at all important\u201d in their lives. According to official census data<\/a>, 99% of Iranians are Muslim.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, evidence from other research organizations paints a much more nuanced picture of public opinion in Iran.<\/p>\n

In the 2020 wave of the World Values Survey, about half of Iranians said they had \u201cquite a lot\u201d or \u201ca great deal\u201d of confidence in their national government, which was actually higher than the corresponding percentage in some Western countries. Gallup obtained<\/a> an almost identical figure in 2022. And in a 2024 survey<\/a>, they found that Iranians approve more of Chinese and Russian leaders than of US leaders.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) asked<\/a> Iranians in 2024 whether \u201cthe Islamic Republic should be replaced with another form of government\u201d and found that 80% disagreed.<\/p>\n

They posed a related question \u2014 whether Iran\u2019s system of government will<\/em> change \u2014 using a list experiment<\/a>. This is a technique for eliciting people\u2019s true beliefs under conditions where they might be inclined to conceal them (such as in a country like Iran). However, the percentage who indicated the system of government would change was only slightly higher in the list experiment, suggesting low levels of belief falsification.<\/p>\n

The CISSM also asked Iranians, \u201cIf you could change one thing about Iran, what would it be?\u201d By far the most common answer was \u201cmore economically prosperous\u201d, whereas only 9% of respondents said \u201cmore democratic and free\u201d. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the economy appears to be widespread.<\/p>\n

All these findings should be interpreted with caution. Even list experiments cannot get around the problem of dissidents being less inclined to participate in surveys. Though the CISSM has done extensive quality control<\/a>. Their estimate of BBC Persian viewership closely matches figures published by BBC Persian itself. And their pollster, IranPoll, was able to predict<\/a> the 2017 Iranian election result to within two percentage points.<\/p>\n

The evidence that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime is weak. In fact, the claims made by Waltz, Cruz and Gingrich are probably wrong.<\/p>\n

Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @NoahCarl90.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The impression you get listening to US politicians talk about Iran is that Iranians overwhelmingly oppose the regime. Mike Waltz says, \u201cThe people of Iran want freedom.\u201d Ted Cruz says, \u201cthe people of Iran want to stand with America\u201d and \u201cthey want to stand with freedom.\u201d Newt Gingrich says, \u201cthe overwhelming majority of Iranians want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":669,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1358],"class_list":["post-57190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/669"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57190"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57196,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57190\/revisions\/57196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57190"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=57190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}