Can American public support for Ukraine survive the election season? While the majority of Americans still back military and economic assistance to this strategic partner, that support has dropped since the heady days of 2022. As the Ukraine issue increasingly becomes a hot potato in the presidential campaign, public support could become even more fragile. Political leaders who support aid to Ukraine, beginning with Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, will have to mount an effective public case to prop up support. While a determined president can stick with an unpopular foreign policy for a while, at some point it becomes untenable. Unless public support is shored up, the current pro-Ukraine policy could well become another casualty of American domestic politics – regardless of who wins in November.
Campaign rhetoric will gradually impact public views in the weeks leading up to the election. As Republicans test out various attacks against Harris, they will inevitably criticize the current administration’s Ukraine policy, especially since Donald Trump picked Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate, a fervent opponent of aid who famously declared, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Given the apparent stalemate on the battlefield, popular support for aid to America’s beleaguered ally is stronger than one might expect, but trends in public opinion and concerted GOP attacks raise the possibility that such support may have a grim future ahead.
The Coming Storm Over Ukraine Policy
Republicans are ramping up their criticisms of Harris, returning Ukraine to the limelight after a period of reduced attention. The issue re-entered mainstream political discourse during the recent presidential debate between Harris and Trump, when the two candidates offered competing policy visions and the former president lashed out against the current administration’s supposed failures in Ukraine.
Despite these attacks, Trump has yet to provide a detailed alternative to President Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy. The GOP nominee has frequently claimed, including during the debate, that he will end the war quickly by securing a peace agreement between the two sides. Trump peddles this proposal as a way of allowing the United States to stop what he calls the “endless flow of American treasure to Ukraine,” although Ukraine’s need for defense assistance to deter a renewed Russian attack would be at least as strong after a bad peace as it is now. Trump has also claimed that current aid should take the form of a loan and that Europe should bear the lion’s share of the economic burden. These positions stem largely from Trump’s confidence in his deal-making abilities and his belief that America is being “ripped off” by its European allies. But NATO allies have considerably increased the percentage of their GDP that they allocate to their own national defense (at least 23 meet NATO’s 2 percent target vs. six countries in 2021, the year Trump left office and before Russia’s 2022 full-scaled invasion of Ukraine), and while the United States is the top donor of military aid to Ukraine, European countries in total have contributed more overall.
Reports about his plans, so far unconfirmed by Trump, claim that his peace deal would allow Russia to take Crimea and the Donbas and prevent NATO from expanding near Russia’s borders. Such an enticing agreement for Russian President Vladimir Putin follows naturally from Trump’s warm relationship with the autocrat and his disdain for what he sees as an unfairly large U.S. role in NATO. Whether Trump could persuade Ukraine to accept the deal is less certain. Despite his frequent boasts about his deal-making prowess, the Trump record of success is remarkably thin.
Trump has proven himself more adept at moving public opinion, or at least Republican opinion. Trump’s increasing opposition to Ukraine aid over time could help explain the public opinion trends described above, as Republican voters seemed to steadily withdraw their support as he became more vocally opposed to assistance. The former president is certainly capable of manipulating elite opinion on Ukraine aid in either direction. He subtly signaled permission earlier this year for new funding for Ukraine, allowing Speaker Mike Johnson to overcome opposition from far-right Republicans and pass aid. But Trump also torpedoed other compromises that would have helped Ukraine. Earlier this year, GOP policymakers requested that border security provisions and Ukraine aid be paired together in one bill. After Senator James Lankford (R-OK) created such a bill, Trump defeated it to deny Biden a political victory on immigration. Republicans subsequently changed their arguments and called for passing border security funding before Ukraine aid. In the end, only Ukraine aid made it to Biden’s desk, as a border security bill has so far failed to survive the Trump veto.
Plus, anti-aid sentiment will have an eager messenger in Vance, perhaps the most outspoken opponent of helping Ukraine in the Senate. Vance has proposed a wide variety of arguments opposing aid, and his views on the issue are more clearly defined than those of the former president. Election season will provide ample opportunity for the VP nominee’s attacks to receive more airtime and attention.
The GOP ticket’s various arguments against aid reflect a conservative drift towards neo-isolationism that has grown increasingly mainstream in recent years. Research conducted by one of us (Robert) that examined press releases and podcasts illustrated this shift. Outlined in a senior thesis, the research covered 97 statements from nine Senate Republicans and 16 podcasts from various conservative commentators. It found that anti-aid arguments can be grouped into five broad “buckets”: Corruption/accountability complaints, concerns about another “endless war,” calls for greater allied burden-sharing, a desire for strategic realignment towards the Pacific, and claims that domestic priorities are getting short shrift due to spending on aid (even though the $174 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian aid that Congress has appropriated for Ukraine and associated activities since Russia’s full-scale invasion, as of April this year, equaled just 1.27 percent of total federal spending of almost $13.375 trillion during that period, an admittedly imperfect comparison given the difference between appropriations and actual spending, but at least indicative). Vance has employed many of these angles in his attacks against aid.
The Harris/Walz Response
Harris is certainly on record as a strong supporter of aid to Ukraine, stating in February in a speech on the Biden administration’s policy that “international rules and norms are on the line, including the fundamental principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity.” The Harris campaign has not focused on the Ukraine issue but invokes her work in rallying NATO to support Ukraine’s defense. There is no discernible gap between her views and those of the Biden administration, both in terms of its support for Ukraine and its cautious approach to the escalation threat posed by Russia’s so-called redlines.
Once she became the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris provided similar justifications for assistance during the debate. However, this apparent support is complicated by reports that she has a slightly frosty relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Harris has not yet visited Ukraine and reportedly upset Ukrainian officials immediately before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion when she rebuffed Zelenskyy’s pleas to sanction Russia and send weapons to Ukraine. Biden’s team reportedly felt that “the threat of sanctions was a greater deterrent to Russia than their imposition, and that providing advanced weaponry to Kyiv would likely strengthen Putin’s conviction that Ukraine was becoming a client state of NATO.”
That said, Harris’ support for aid to Ukraine seems rock-solid when compared with her statements on Israel’s war in Gaza. While Harris has reiterated her support for Israel, she also has expressed markedly more empathy than the president for Palestinian civilians and the loss of more than 40,000 lives in Gaza. The fact that Harris has made no similar attempt to move away from Biden’s Ukraine policy suggests that she genuinely supports further assistance to Ukraine.
Her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, also has expressed strong support for aid to Ukraine, even setting up a joint agricultural venture involving his home state and Ukraine. Plus, the governor’s plainspoken style and military background could make him a much more effective messenger on Ukraine than Biden has been.
The Verdict
As the election approaches, how will these positions fly with voters? Beginning with the Republican ticket, public opinion trends indicate that voters will be receptive to arguments opposing aid. Polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that while 79 percent of Americans supported military assistance to Ukraine in March 2022, a more modest 58 percent were in favor of such aid in February 2024. Even more significant is the 22 percentage point drop in support over the same period among independents, a bloc that is more likely to listen to both parties and includes the few remaining undecided voters who will help decide the election. That seems to offer an opening for Trump and Vance to convince crucial voters that Ukraine aid is no longer worth the cost. Furthermore, considering the likely contribution of Russian disinformation campaigns to public skepticism of aid, and the fact that such efforts will only increase in the coming weeks, the opening could soon grow even wider.
Harris and Walz have not shrunk from making the case for Ukraine on the campaign trail. Harris eloquently justified this policy on the debate stage, and an advertisement was recently released linking her support of Ukraine to a long history of American presidents from both parties (from Reagan to Kennedy) who “defied Russia’s communist dictators and defended American ideals” – and then pointedly referencing 800,000 voters of Polish extraction who understand the threats posed by Russia and happen to reside in the electorally pivotal state of Pennsylvania. Emphasizing continuities between Harris and Reagan represents a striking inversion of usual stereotypes and could help court traditional Republicans disaffected by MAGA neo-isolationism.
A sustained message to this end is likely necessary if Harris is to successfully pump the brakes on declining public opinion in favor of aid. This is because the Democratic ticket is confronting a Republican foe who has demonstrated a unique ability to mold both public and elite opinion in his image and his VP nominee who has made abandoning Ukraine a central part of his foreign policy rhetoric.
And this final factor may be decisive. Of the four, the candidate who cares most about the issue of aid to Ukraine is clearly Vance — in his opposition. It is unlikely that Democratic messaging will emphasize the importance of aid to the same extent as Republican attacks will question it. Rather, Harris is more likely to focus on issues that are proven winners for Democrats, issues on which she is especially well-suited to attack her opponent, such as abortion and domestic threats to democracy. Not only does this mean that American public support for Ukraine could suffer during the election season; it also means that a future President Harris might take office with a weak public mandate on Ukraine aid. Sustaining support after Nov. 5 will surely be difficult if the Harris campaign digs itself a hole during election season. While the debate proved that Harris could deliver a stirring defense of current policy upon explicit request, the challenges remain daunting, and the future uncertain, for public support of U.S. aid to Ukraine.