It was the war that clobbered Republicans.
Mark, Dan, and Tanner Nau all take issue with my post pointing to the war in Iran as the most consequential factor driving down Republican fortunes in this election.
All the arguments concede that it was a factor, but point to the fact that the president slid some after Liberation Day. Granted, going from 47 approval on Inauguration Day to stabilizing at 40 isn’t optimal. But dropping to 33 by August of 2026 is catastrophic. The argument was about impact and scale of defeat, and it is still right.
Dan on the Corner and Andy (on X) imply heavily that leaning on the war as an explanation amounts to dishonesty and self-interest. “The emerging narrative, or rather excuse, from the right-populist wing is . . .” Dan begins. The people arguing thus (yours truly exempted) are “ranting,” and dissembling about the responsibility of the president. Andy calls Vance’s post arguing that the war was the major factor “gaslighting.”
Dan writes:
If you look at the exit polls, you hear cited that 74 percent said the Iran war was “crucial” or a “major issue” for their vote. But that was clearly not a matter of voters saying it was their exclusive priority. The same polls showed that 89 percent said the cost of living was crucial or major, 90 percent said that government corruption was crucial or major, 36 percent said immigration enforcement was crucial or major, and 23 percent said AI and data centers were crucial or major.
This is weird. Cost of living isn’t separable from the Iran war policy, since the consequent (and expected) closure of the strait led to an energy shock which had a far more profound effect on prices than tariffs. Foreign policy is typically dismissed as something voters don’t ever really care about — the fact that 74 percent said it was crucial or major is a deafening alarm bell.
If you do the same trick with tariffs — try to separate them from the cost of living — the problem of the tariffs disappears. In May Fox News ran a poll and asked for their top economic worry; 58 percent of voters named the cost of living, which was up eight points from an earlier poll in February. (Why? I wonder.) Only 8 percent of respondents named tariffs as their top economic worry.
That is, when voters are asked any question about the economy, they have been answering in the negative for a long time now whether it is the war or tariffs. But, voters were far more likely to point to the war and connect it to increased costs of living, and see Trump’s action as a betrayed promise. As we will see, that sense of betrayal connects directly to the disaffection of Trump 2024 voters.
If this were just a dastardly form of conspiratorial gaslighting by self-interested and disingenuous populists, well, then the entire Republican electoral apparatus was in on this privately all summer. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swann, and Shane Goldmacher have a deep dive into the electoral disaster over at the New York Times. Tariffs do get a mention, along with bungled immigration enforcement and corruption. But internal Republican pollsters were reporting pretty much exactly what JD Vance said they were. James Blair, former deputy chief of staff, who was running the White House midterm strategy, centered the war:
The slide deck that Mr. Blair had circulated over the summer to officials in the West Wing was stark.
One slide linked Republicans’ polling numbers to an Iran war timeline.
It showed how the Democratic advantage had ballooned during active hostilities, shrunk during talks over a “memorandum of understanding” and then spiked again when the cease-fire collapsed.
By the end of July, Democrats had a 10-point edge on the congressional ballot.
The “bottom line” was hard to miss. It was in highlighter yellow: Republicans could still conceivably win the House if Democrats had only a four-point edge. “But that won’t happen without an extended cease-fire, Hormuz open & gas prices falling,” the slide warned.“A final result approaching D+10 would likely cost us the Senate.”
The results on Tuesday were even worse: Mr. Trump’s party is on track to lose the national popular congressional vote by about 13 points, according to estimates by The New York Times. It is shaping up to be the worst loss in a half-century, since the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
And this:
Yet Mr. Trump’s own pollster’s final survey, taken two weeks before the election, showed that while both the MAGA Republican brand and democratic socialists were unpopular with voters, MAGA carried more baggage. When Republicans who were not planning to cast ballots were asked what it would take to earn back their vote, their top two answers were ending the war and addressing inflation. [Emphasis mine, though how could you miss it?]
I encourage those curious to read the whole thing. This account matches up with the evidence of our own eyes, where Donald Trump clearly saw the problem his policy presented him and his party politically, and allowed his admin room to try to shift it in the summer.
Again, contrary to bizarre claims by Erick Erickson that the memorandum of understanding (MOU) drove the Iran war’s unpopularity, the president’s own party’s read of the evidence clearly indicated that a cease-fire was preferable. The polls showed the president’s approval going up during the period of the MOU. If the MOU was the unpopular part, Trump’s approval with Republicans would have gone up when it ceased to be in effect, not continued to plunge. If the war was as popular with Republicans as Erickson and his two Senator sources allege, why didn’t the Republican majority in both houses supply our fighting men and women with the endorsement of the Article 1 branch of our government? Do they not deserve it?
Someone is trying to talk themselves into a convenient narrative. Many have gone after Vance for seeming to break with President Trump over Iran. Politico reports that Vance cleared his post on X this morning with people in the White House. “President Donald Trump was ‘totally fine with it,” the senior White House official said,” instantly breaking down a fake controversy being promoted by the Wall Street Journal, Mark Levin, and Marc Thiessen who claim to be the true interpreters of MAGA. ABC reports that the president deemed Vance’s post “largely true.”
It was the war that clobbered Republicans. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Did you not see the first installment when it was released 20 years ago? It was a memorable event. The war is what drove the inflation data because gas went from under $3 a gallon in February to nearly $5 a gallon this summer. The war is what the internal polls said drove the outcome; it is what we see reflected in the unusual salience of foreign policy in the exit polls. It is why we saw candidates like Husted and others break with the admin over it. It’s how the White House campaign team understood the environment. According to the Times, it is how the president’s opponents and Democrats understood it. The reporting suggests this is how the president himself understands it, which is why he was fine with Vance airing it out.
The Times reporting, the Vance post on X, and the president’s electoral team managing the midterm elections all agree with the plain, obvious truth before our eyes. The gaslighting and convenient “narratives” may be coming from those trying to downplay the war as the driving factor.