Of course, under the Obama Administration, we had the landmark nuclear deal which traded sanctions relief for curbs on Irans Nuclear program. Since the Trump Administration, comedeal has, increasingly in question. Trump has done the minimum to continue u. S. Compliance with the nuclear agreement, but the administration has put in sanctions on those iranian individuals and entities. Congress has passed sanctions connected mostly to the missile program. President trump has expressed that he must continue to certify that iran is complying with the nuclear deal. This is one of the requirements. Aneven suggested in interview to the wall street journal the other day that he continue to put out these continue to put out these necessary certifications. October may seem rather far away given what is going on in washington right now but one thing we have learned isoctobert even words alone in washington can have a big impact. Im delighted that we have our guest with us. He was last with us in january. To present the results of a new poll. It looks at iranian attitude towards the u. S. , irans policies in the region. Thehim will present results and then we will have a Panel Discussion on the results. He will be joined by a former Senior Adviser at the world bank. Has a great deal of knowledge about the iranian economy. And paul tiller from georgetown university, also a veteran of the u. S. Intelligence community and a former National Intelligence officer. If i can ask you to please silence your cell phones, especially because this is on cspan. Feel free to tweet. With that, let me invite ibrahim to come up. Ibrahim ok, so thank you, barbara. Im going toly be talking about t wofolds. A lot of the other material i will be presenting is based on these two poles and previous falls that the university of maryland has conducted in iran over the past. The main question i want to thatre today one is what is the meaning of rouhanis reelection . The second what do most iranians rouhani to do domestically, regionally and internationally . The topics, the surveys that we covered are a wide range of topics to look at the material that has been published. You can see the results. The other one is about a month after the election. 11 days after the terror attacks in tehran. When you see the data, be mindful about the data was collected a week after the terror attack in tehran. That is very important. Both of these are computerassisted telephone interviewing. Its 3. 1 . When we talk about the meaning of rouhanis election, there has been a lot of analysis about what does his reelection mean . That people want into continuity of rouhani or they are looking at him as an agent of change. These are the questions we tried to explore in our polls. One of the questions we had was an open ended question. Could speak basically their mind and then collect their response. What do you think was the main message and meaning of rouhanis reelection . In response to this question, there was no consensus among iranians. Thery are basically all over the place. 11 say it shows people are satisfied with his performance. People 11 say it shows want him to complete his tasks. You can look down the list, but i think what is important is 25 , or 26 cannot say what it means. The other one is that we see no general consensus. Wen, we ask respondents, provide them with a set of meanings and ask them whether they agree with those meanings or not. List of stuff. What we see is people generally agreed that rouhanis reelection thes mean people approve t deal and approve of rouhanis economic policies. When you say the other stuff, we deal with, the divide as sometimes hear about. We see there is no general agreement when it comes to people saying that it means people want religion to play a role. Or they want to stop the missiles. What is interesting this is one of the findings that surprised me the notion that rouhanis reelection means that people want religion to play a larger role. People who vote for rouhani are most likely to voice their opposition to this notion. Tople take this as slander represent rouhani as people who want Something Else for the country. What do people demand then . If there is no consensus, but there is agreement that rouhanis reelection does mean there is general support for his foreignpolicy, we can look at it from a different angle and ask what do the iranian people want the next president of iran . We would talk about the next president. The june poll, we were talking about president rouhani. What do they think is the rouhani . Issue of that is the question we asked, open rouhani . That is the question we asked, open ended. Asked them what is the single most important issue that the country is facing . That, we geto overwhelmingly people basically mention Economic Issues. Unemployment being at the top of the list. Mind you, this is after a terrorist attack in tehran. Had asking the same question in may, the unemployment numbers were a lot higher. Both those numbers have gone down to Security Issues which gets 4 and other security related issues. After a terrorist attack, we naming Economic Issues as the top priority. That really signifies something. And then we asked them another question. The range of actions rouhani could take. Priorityw much of a does each of these have from a scale from zero to 10. Zero meaning it does not have any priority and 10 meaning it does have a lot of priority. Security goes on top of the from but not by much unemployment. The red is people saying 10. They want a lot of things to be a top priority, but as you can unemployment. See, on top of the list are irans security and after is the unemployment issue in iran. We asked about rouhanis standing through a number of questions. And how the country is doing. Generally, we get mixed feelings from the respondents. As far as the economysee, on to, increasing numbers say its bad. Bad. Ay it is 36 say its good. What is important ais among the half of them say it is very bad. You can see how that is working. When we asked them is it Getting Better or gettingbad. Worse . You know, since june of last year, more people say it is getting bad than people saying it is getting good. On awe evaluate rouhani list of issues. Worse . This shows some of what peoples sense of the economy but the economy is not the only thing. We asked respondents to evaluate rouhani. As you can see, a good number of issues, he gets very good ratings. The top is improving the health care system, foreign policy, civil liberties, getting sanctions lifted, making iran more advanced and even more selfsufficient. When it comes to Economic Issues and corruption, you get less than a majority. Ar reducing unemployment, majority safety has been unsuccessful. That is important because when to the feeling people have, which is unemployment beinga top of the list, this low makes them pretty vulnerable. With these kinds of ratings, some past how did he win the election . If people are saying he has not been successful and the number one issue they have, how did rouhani win the election . Pollse have done a lot of , both before and after. Multiple polling entities in iran that covered the election all along. A lot ofes us with information about how and why rouhani did get reelected. As an introduction, i want to say scientific polls are very predictive in this election as in previous ones. You some let me give examples. This is an iran poll on the 16th of may giving interview to the economist. It predicted rouhani was going to get 58 . This is may 16. It was published before the results. It showed how predictive the polls were. 57 were going to vote for rouhani. Iranians do have polling agencies. All of these are published before the results. The election was 57 for rouhani. The polls that were conducted election were actually only two Percentage Points away from the actual results. When we look at those polls and want to analyze how did rouhani get reelected, one thing that is thatunquestionable is rouhanis victory was not certain until another candidate left the race. The results would have been much closer. This is a typo. That was just confusing. Resii meant was would have left the race. When you look at all of the polls conducted, these are the two points that we can take away. Months before the election when we asked poepeople actually not we how likely is it rouhani would lose the election . 61 said it was very or somewhat likely. 29 said it was not likely. This is a result of our may 11 poll. The one we conducted before the election. Here are the numbers again. When we add their numbers, in this case, and add jahangiri and rouhanis numbers, we have a tie. When you look at the numbers, we get the same situation. If you add these numbers, you would get a higher proportion of people that are opponents of rouhani. The trick was in the second choice of the respondents. The supporters were divided between rouhani and another. When you ask voters who you would vote for if a candidate leaves the race, 40 said they would vote for rouhani compared to 60 for raisi. When you look at raisi voters, over 65 said they would vote not for rouhani. This is going back to the second point here. The results i cannot say for sure rouhani would have lost. He probably would have won, but the margins would have been so se 3 margin of error it would have been very difficult it would have been very difficult to ascertain what would have happened. Now, this is from the adversity of university of tehran numbers. There was never a doubt in any rds that raisi that would lose. The same was not true r about te other candidate. You put these two together. Ghalibaf withdraws from the election on may 15. Closer. Ch this spike you se e these are numbers. On poll low name recognition. Months before the election, safety percent have not heard of this name. 70 could not say anything positive or negative about raisi. That shows what a load name recognition low name recognition he has. Raisi, the main opponent. Charge of thes in ace imam of the the shiites. It is a Charity Organization involved in a lot of business. Previously, he was a highranking official in the judiciary. Again, very little executive experience, oldschool conservative views. By all polling, his Campaign Performance was not that great. It was rated poor. He was running against an incumbent. Raisil of these was not that strong of an opponents o to begin with. That is why i was actually surprised when i saw he had 38 of the vote. When you look at these second term voting history of iranian president s, rouhani got the lowest historically of any incumbent has ever gotten an office. You should keep all of these in mind. We look at the present and the ramifications. The mandate and the forcefulness in which we can go forward. Going forward with the jcpoa, one of the things that happened in the election, we will talk about it, is that the approval of the jpcoa. 67 of iranians say they are at least strongly or somewhat approve of the jcpoa. Again, they are disappointed about the economic benefits that delivered. Hus far this is a question we have been hasng of whether the jcpoa actually improved peoples living conditions. 70 say it has not. Approvedsay it is not and 27 say it has approved a little. When it comes to the United States, attitudes towards the United States and how it is behaving with respect, those numbers increasingly say people are not confident that the United States will live up to its end of the bargain. What is interesting to me, i think iranians expected the United States, trump in particular, to be less forthcoming when it comes to the deal. Before ttrump actually took higher number of people were saying the United States was not going to live up to the end of the bargain. You will see this number has come down actually from 78 to 72 . We will talk about why that is. At the end of the day, 72 say they are not confident. 24 say they are confident. I think the main issue for iranian people and for policymakers as they talk to the people, it is basically article 29 where iranians have obtained a promise from the United States, European Countries to refrain from doing anything that would prevent the normalization of regular trade and economic relations of other countries with iran. This is the main issue that i think a lot of people are saying in iran that regular trade and c relations of other countries with iran. This is the main the u. S. Is trg to prevent other countries from normalizing their trade relationships with iran. We can see that number increasing from 75 last yea r, people saying the United States is trying to prevent its obligations, and the number has increased to 81 . When it comes to donald trump, Analysis Shows that he would do something that would be at ods with the jcpoa. When it comes to the new sanctions, we have asked this question back then, it was not certain yet. We phrased it that the United States is thing about imposing new sanctions on iran because of missiles, help of groups like hezbollah. They wanted to get their feeling towards these new sanctions. If they see these new sanctions to be at odds with the jcpoa or jcpoa. Rmative with the 14 say it would be compatible. 24 say it is against the spirit. 49 say it would be both against the spirit and the letter of the jcpoa. We asked another question and i think this is the position o that i14 say it would be compa. S becoming harder and there is some difficulty on what iran should do if the u. S. Abdicated. Two options one would be to accessing the Nuclear Program they agreed to suspend or taking the issue to the u. N. While remaining in line with the jcpoa. Previously, the no majority for retaliation. In december, it was 48 . Forin may during the election process, it became all the way down to 45 , people saying we should retaliate. After the attack and after a lot of talk about the position of the new sanctions, that number has gone up to 55 that iran should retaliate if the u. S. Abdicates. That is bad news for the jcpoa. Jcpoa enjoys a large majority of iranians who approve of it. What is the source of their support . From the data, there are three things that i can say. None of the candidates opposed to the jcpoa. When the talk was about the nuclear deal, it was who is going to make the u. S. And other countries we are going to make most of the jcpoa, as ng a positionici negotiating it. The other one is the nuclear deal has proven to be more resilient that the iranians actually thought. That is why when we look at the trump takesrethe other one office, a much higher percentage saying that the u. S. Will walk out of it. When you look at the numbers after he takes office and after some time passes, less people say the u. S. Will abdicate. In peoples trump takes office, mind, the deal has proven to be more resilient than originally thought. Most importantly, iranians have their hopes on other countries, especially europe and not the u. S. This is the major source of support and optimism when it comes to the nuclear deal. We asked the same question that we asked about the u. S. And 53 say they are somewhat confident that they will live up to their obligations. When we asked have the relationship improved as a iran and European Countries, 68 say it has to 26 . As opposed this perception that things are improving with the rest of the created this optimism about the deal. 59 say they are optimistic that Going Forward the Program Makes peoples lives better, even though it has not done anything yet. 38 say they are not optimistic. Moving from this to the notion of negotiation. Of iran of iran renegotiating the jcpoa, either to extend the duration or terminating altogether. That is a question that we put forth. We said that trump is trying to renegotiate. What do you think iran should do as trump threatens u. S. Sanctions . Iran agrees to increase the nuclear limits under the jcpoa. T the second one the terminating Nuclear Enrichment program. We gave them three options. One, iran access the demands. One is to agree to negotiate and only get trump agrees to lift sanctions on iran. The third is iran should not agree under any circumstances. We gave these options for both of the questions. We see for both of them, a majority of people what is important, when we look at people who approve and who reject, people who think the nuclear deal has made peoples lives better as well as people who are more confident that u. S. Will live up to its end of the bargain, they are more likely to ofinto the second category they are more open to negotiation. When you look at people who say the nuclear deal has not made peoples lives better or that they feel the United States will it, they are more likely to reject the agreement. Into the lasto section of the results. Thats irans regional involvement. A lot of that happens now after the terror attack. Interesting seeing as we started collecting data seven days after the terror attack. Asking questions about that. Interesting52 , to an open endn when we asked who you think is behind the terror attack . Isis was the number one answer. Arabiastates and saudi also. This is an open ended question. When we say how likely is it that these entities provided help and support to the attack, saudi arabia, israel and United States, a majority say it is very likely the perpetrators received help or guidance from these entities. Consequently, when we look at the number of people who say iran should increase its support for groups that are fighting isis, that has increased 12 points since december. Sulemanis favorability numbers. In may, this was before the election, in may was 55 . Only a month later, it jumped up to 61 saying they have favorable views of him and he remains on top of the list of things that we ask about. By rouhani and others. The other question we asked is whether iran should send military personnel to syria or not, and we give them arguments. Personnel because if we dont these rebels might come and threatened iran security, compared to involving yourself, you would create more enemies for iran. This number has basically remained kind of the same since december. This number has not gone up. Support for sending more personnel. Despite support for irans engagement against isis, when it collaborating to fightUnited States isis, the number of people who disapprove has actually increased. There is now 55 disapproval compared to 44 . Look at the number to fight in august 15 2015 a medially after the nuclear deal. People were feeling weak accomplished one thing, lets collaborate on other aiareas. As a conclusion, two things i would take away one is the economy remains a major concern of iran . In augusti think rouhani needso demonstrate some progress on that front before he can move on doing anything else in other areas. The other thing which i think is important is jcpoa continues we see this relationship to be the direction iran should take Going Forward. See people who think that jcpoa is working, making peoples lives better, see peope a lot more accommodating in a wide range of things compared to people who say it is not worth it, the u. S. Is not living up to its end of the bargain. They seem to be a lot more hesitant. We see the consequence of this. This pivotal question about whether iran should focus on selfsufficiency or whtherether should increase its role with other countries. We see the number of people who say iran should seek selfsufficiency, this number is on the rise. When we look at the people who say selfsufficiency compared to others, this is linked to their views of the jcpoa. I think the jcpoa continues to experiment through the lens of which a lot of iranians are talking about how iran should go. Barbara thank you. Thanks. There is a lot to chew on there. Maybe too much. I think i want to ask the obvious first question, why should we believe these polls . A lot of people even in the u. S. Would say they are not terribly reliable and in iran some people suspicious of a phone call from the outside. This is coming from a canadian outfit that conducts the polls. Why should we have real faith in these numbers . Ebrahim a few things. First of all, they have demonstrated to be very predictive. I showed those numbers. They gave an, when interview to the economist three days before the election, they got the number right on. Rouhanis numbers were not very different from the numbers of the poll. We see them being predictive in other areas as well. That is one reason i think we should basically use, make the most out of these polls numbers. The other thing is when we compare, for example, with Response Rates as compared to others. The Response Rates were much better. Tople are not very hesitant voice their opinions. All it takes is for you to listen to these interviews or people have experienced of going to tehran and talking to people, as you have. Generally, you dont get a sense that people are trying to basically hold back their views. Theyre actually quite eager to voice them. For example, one anecdote, usually in the United States we limit the duration of polls to about 10 minutes max. If it goes beyond that, people tend to hang up. In iran, polls are 40 minutes long. What is interesting is people not only give their responses to the question, but they provide the justification of why their response is accurate. They go even beyond and say how the question can be improved. [laughter] ebrahim it is a very engaged process. They have beent predictive, if you just listen to these interviews, it will give you more confidence. Barbara people like to give their opinions. I will start with you on the economic aspects of this. Weve seen all along that people were very hopeful that jcpoa would make a huge difference in their lives, yet according to these polls, the Economic Situation is still bad as far as iranians think. A slight majoritya slight majork it is worse or getting worse than they were before. What accounts for that . Is it people complaining because they like to complain . How how much has the economy really improved and what do you see is the threat from the Trump Administration, this constant uncertainty over whether the u. S. Will continue to abide by its obligations . First of all, thank you very much for this session. Thank you for inviting me. Very interesting findings you have. Confirm the feelings and issues that have been discussed without new numbers and numerical findings. You mentioned two things expectations and uncertainty. Eoples expectations can movea when you look at 2016 elections, even though the Obama Administration had really turned around the economy, it was people felt very unemployment was close to 4 , people still felt very negative about the economy. The same thing i think is happening in iran. 13 years of 12, bad news coming after another, peoples expectations were very much raised. I think the rouhani government has purposely raised it in order what kind of gains they could have done. The expectations were very high. To some extent, they had the net. Benen met. The economy grew last year by 6. 8 . They actually moved the needle on the global economy. It moved the needle by 0. 1 . You would think that is not a big deal but when we think about the entire advanced world, advanced economy growing by 1. 9 to 2 , you see for one year, iran coming onto the global market, moving the needle is actually quite a lot. It is not insignificant. Most of this growth has come from the oil sector. The growth was 12. 5 . Was 3. 3 . Sector that has not grown as much as people would have liked, but good indicators that it is moving in the right direction. I want to maybe make two more indicators. Of is that the rate inflation was around 45 before good rouhani came to power. Tell meer they would they would go to the store in the morning to buy milk and by the evening the price has raised quite a bit. The rate of inflation was 12thed to about 9 for the 2016 and nowin 10. 2 . The worry that people had when rouhani took power was high unemployment, high inflation rates. That was the fear. The rouhani government focused on two issues. Fiscal policy and monetary policy. That may have succeeded. They have succeeded to bring down these indicators. They need to fix the Financial Sector and fix the real sector of the economy which requires reforms, i would say, but hopefully they would come. Would you like me to mention some indicators . For the preparation of this gathering, i looked at the most recent centralbank bulletin that came out. A couple of things were quite interesting. In iran, when people wanted to put their money somewhere, they would put it into construction, buildings, apartments. What is interesting to see is that the number of permits given to Construction Projects has dropped considerably from 173,000 to 113,000 permits. It is a huge drop. Not only in terms of the numbers, but also square footage. Arether words, iranians trying to find other ways to invest their money. Found same time, what i was that the manufacturing 5000 tohas risen from 5400. The value of these 400 has almost doubled. The value of the new permits is almost double the ones that were previous. People putting their money in the Construction Center had a 40 decline and has impact on employment because construction is a quick way to generate employment, even though it is not permanent. It is a way of generating employment. According to the world bank, the sector declined. That playedinty an impact on people not knowing what they want to do and buy land, property because property will always be there, but maybe not your stocks in the stock market. We see a little bit of a change in the perception. One more indicator i found very interesting was that the volume declined, as has the volume in terms of u. S. Dollars has declined declined, 4 billion to 44 billion. The volume of tonnage has declined from 43 million tons. Value has the unit gone up. There is a shift. People are importing more capital goods, equipment for manufacturing. Importing more they are thinking more longterm by getting more expensive products. Maybe putting them into these manufacturing sectors. Most of these new or more expensive products are being procured from europe. The United States is really losing out to a large extent. I was reading that estimates for how much the United States can made is 1 trillion to be with engagement with iran. That is something the Trump Administration, the congress is leaving on the table which could actually feet into creating jobs in the United States. Barbara thank you for that. One thing we have seen, a big increase in european trade with iran. We have seen some investment as well, multimillion dollar deal for gas fields. We had European Company selling Railroad Cars and a variety of things. That may be reflected there. Europeans are strongly jcpoa. Ing the iranian strongly support it, but the u. S. Attitude is uncertain. Im curious what you make of the numbers, what you think in particular of this implied threat to restart aspects of the Nuclear Program that had been suspended under the nuclear deal. Just because iranian Public Opinion favors it, does not mean the government will necessarily do it. It is an interesting nationalistic response. Paul thanks. These two basic approaches that which is atake consequently u. S. Withdrawal from the agreement for quite some time, one could make a case in either of directions. Iranians could try to keep the agreement alive with the participation of the other side deal. Deal. They would be relying on the european support and the russian support. They would be relying on the isolated position for the United States on this issue and other issues we have seen under this administration such as climate change. Whyother approach, that is one of the pieces of information was so interesting, is to say we are say we are free from the nuclear restrictions. One of the biggest movements from the previous polls and the current polls was on this very question of those saying lets respond by resuming the limited Nuclear Activity. I would say i would have placed my pets more on the first alternative. Perhaps nudgeults me more in the 5050 direction in terms of what the iranian response would be. It would depend on multiple calculations by the iranian leadership. One would be strictly economic. And some of the things you were talking about with regard to trade matters going more to the european end. It is better for iran to maintain those newly expanded economic links with the even though they are not getting the big enchilada, the United States, as far as trade and commerce is concerned. The other rational and technical calculation would be what would be the advantages of doing expanded Nuclear Activity . The Iranian Nuclear people, Nuclear Program continues. How much more different would it make to be able to up the limit um. Urania my guess is the calculation would be it doesnt make a lot of difference and that would be an argument for taking the first alternative. That said, when you have a poll result like this this is the political new view in which iranian leaders, or the supreme leader, will have to make decisions. You cannot just brush that off. There might be a calculation along the lines of we need to stand up to the americans and how are we going to do it . Barbara we saw the other day after Congress Passed the new sanctions that iranian tested another missile. Barbara i would like your thougn that but also this one other aspect. If you could address it as well, some suggested that there will be an effort to ask for more inspections of military facilities. Results on some of the we heard about their perception about the Trump Administration and what the United States is doing. It strikes me as very accurate. Majority is right. This very skeptical about administration. Certainly. Willingness to do things. Get the things like the they will perceive that as a gambit. Which is part of an effort by opponents of the jcpoa here in the United States to get iran first move toward the agreement dead. Thats the sort of cynicism very be theiate that will starting point for any iranian calculations. That iran will be very careful with such effort to the brink there. Yes. Thate add to something paul was saying. I totally agree. When you look at the data, one of the things we see is that in of iran pond to u abrogation of the deal. Feel that iran benefited from the deal. More likely to be in the first category. Of peoplehe category who say that we need to keep this together. Oa. Uld not leave the jcp o it. What comes out of be inen they tend to the other category. People would say, youre not deal tong from this begin with. Why should we accept being humiliated as well. Theres also the political dynamic. Think paul is absolutely right. Perceived abrogate theres an urge to respond. There is a demand that we need in response. Ng iran sanctions, when this was saw them saying y and z. X, it was return to pond to u. S. Action against iran. It would be very difficult for to iranian policymakers basically see the u. S. , taking perceivedat are not jcoa compatible with the and not present themselves in in some way. N i terms of the inspections, dont want to say the administration joseph sold it. Iran upperception in the nuclear deal its different from the nuclear deal itself. The polls wen conducted immediately after the nuclear deal. Deal toerceive the include hold sanctions. People perceive the deal thats any new block sanctions. Misperceptions about the deal were corrected over time. Thing that was never corrected a remain the misperception. Probably because every single iranian general and iran official came out to say, were not going to do that. That was allow inspection of military. The perception in iran was that not allowoes inspection of Iranian Military and secure installation. The perception on the ground. Every single iranian general has e on tv after were going to break away from the last part of this. You can watch any time you like
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