When voters stay home over a war, that does mean that disgust over a foreign policy decision can drive results at the state legislative level.
In his defense of the argument that Republican travails are entirely about the war in Iran (and, for that matter, only about the war and not about its execution or the botched cease-fire) — and that anyone pointing to the damage done by the Trump tariff policy for nearly a year before the war is “gaslighting” — Michael Brendan Dougherty points to Donald Trump’s approval ratings: “Going from 47 approval on Inauguration Day to stabilizing at 40 isn’t optimal. But dropping to 33 by August of 2026 is catastrophic.”
Dan’s characterization of my argument isn’t backed up with any quotations because it doesn’t describe what I argued accurately. The first time I broached this subject on election night, I wrote:
“Defeat has a thousand fathers. So Trump’s character, the corruption in Washington, the graft, the social media posts, the on-again off-again tariffs — everything contributed to Republican defeats tonight.”
If Dan was right that I had said or implied “anyone pointing to the damage done by tariff policy was gaslighting,” I’d have been guilty of the gaslighting myself in the very first post that kicked off this argument. My conclusion stated my conviction that those “privileging” other issues were trying to sell a just-so story. When I defended my view again in a subsequent post, I was quite clear that the view I was defending was that the war was “the most consequential” factor, not the “only” one as Dan alleges.
In the second post, I conceded in the second paragraph that indeed Trump slid after the Liberation Day tariffs, and clarified, “The argument was about impact and scale of defeat, and it is still right.” I made the same argument on Twitter and elsewhere. My objection to some outsiders to NR in this debate that they are using the tariff subject as a cynical tactic falls on those who continually insist that I have not addressed, am afraid to address, or am being underhanded in not addressing their preferred explanation, when I have done so nearly half a dozen times in published writing in the space of 36 hours.
Dan says he doesn’t know what poll I got the 33 percent number from. It was Reuters/Ipsos rather than a polling average.
Dan insists one can’t wave away the first 13 months of a 21 month slide. Okay, who did that? Is this still arguing with me?
Dan writes that I’m somehow separating the war from its execution. Where did he find that? Where did I say that? Once a war of choice is launched, referring to “the war” can’t help but mean both the decision and all that flowed from it.
Listeners to The Editors‘s post-election show will hear me argue in an animated way against Dan Foster that this separation can even be done at the conceptual level. When Dan Foster says that the rejection of the Iran war by voters is mostly about rising prices and it is being used by others to argue for a different foreign policy, I interjected that — given what everyone knew about the likely blockade of the strait — trying to separate these is like trying to argue that John Wilkes Booth did nothing unobjectionable firing his gun at the theater, people were only upset that the fired bullet hit the president’s head. Objections to wars usually take into account predictable consequences.
The very first day we resumed hostilities I questioned why we were going ahead under the notion that regime change could be managed or effected through air power, a notion that most conservatives had rejected in the 1990s.
Perhaps it is because I mentioned the New York Times story with the reporting that the White House pollster found Trump’s approval started bouncing back during the MOU cease-fire, and crashed again when hostilities resumed, and that his pollster — a supporter of the war — understood the polls as indicating that the war itself was the problem. This evidence may not be conclusive, but I believe any fair reading of it cuts against the notion floated by others — Erick Erickson, now Marc Thiessen — that the war’s unpopularity was primarily caused by the memorandum of understanding. I don’t think we have any evidence for their view.
Why don’t I find the rebuttals persuasive? Trump’s economic agenda has never been popular, even when people loved the economy in his first term. Polls alone as evidence prove too much. People have hated the tax cuts almost as much or more than the tariffs. Trump’s tax cuts in the first term started at 29 percent approval (Gallup). The TCJA average for them 33 percent approval and Gallup never recorded an above-water number for them.
In the second term, polls from KFF, Morning Consult and, Fox News in the summer found the Trump tax cuts in the mid-30s. Although there isn’t one consistent poll question across both administrations, from what I can see, tariff opinion has barely moved since 2018 (Quinnipiac, AP-Norc, CNN/SSRS). That rough reading is true even if the nature of the tariffs changed dramatically.
Trump’s economic agenda has always been unpopular as policy, and the Liberation Day tariffs, if they were the sole cause of his fall afterwards — and they were not — only brought him down to where he was during the first administration. That’s a slide I’ve acknowledged half a dozen times. Nor since Liberation Day have I ever been less than candid about my structural, economic, and legal criticisms of the tariffs, even if I strenuously reject free trade as policy and ideology and support the effort to increase investment in America. To me, the drop in support on Liberation Day looks real enough, but it looks like a return to a baseline. I’m searching for an explanation for why 2026 is so much worse than 2018.
I simply believe — as the president’s own pollsters seem to have believed — that the war is the most consequential item turning this election from a bad rebuke into a historic repudiation. The president’s own pollster found that who turned out for Trump in 2024 and were planning to stay home this year cited the war first and cost of living next.
And yes, to answer another colleague’s question, when voters stay home over a war, that does mean that disgust over a foreign policy decision can drive results at the state legislative level.