The idea that the war was the whole problem, and that nothing else need be learned, is arrant nonsense.
The emerging narrative, or rather excuse, from the right-populist wing is that last night’s across-the-board electoral disaster for Republicans was all about the Iran war, and only about the Iran war. That’s the message from Vice President JD Vance, who ominously suggests as a major lesson that Republicans need to “change our relationship to Israel.” Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that it’s “the war, stupid.” Many of these voices are (unlike Michael) ranting against the war without mentioning who decided to go to war and has been running the policy ever since.
Now, the Iran war is unpopular, and there’s no question that it contributed to the scale of the defeat. I’ve had more to say before, since the day the war started, and will again, about how Donald Trump failed to sell the war to the public or get the approval of Congress, how he never spelled out clear war aims or established visible victory conditions, and how he picked a worst-of-both-worlds halfway ground between a targeted strike on Iranian capabilities that would have been over much faster, and a regime change operation that would have had a clear objective and aimed at a permanent solution of the problem of the Iranian regime. He made things worse by trying to cut an ill-considered deal with the mullahs that had Vance written all over it and fell apart almost immediately. The war dragged on longer than projected — Americans aren’t anti-war, but they hate wars that are neither short nor showing visible progress toward a foreseeable end — it has impacts on the very visible metric of gas prices, and because of the nature of how Trump and Vance campaigned, it felt like a betrayal to a segment of their base of what they had promised.
All true. But then, I’m not the one here arguing that the election was about one and only one thing. Because the idea that the war was the whole problem, and that nothing else need be learned, is arrant nonsense. It specifically overlooks the biggest thing foisted on us by the populists: the tariffs.
The reality is that Trump, and therefore his party, was already in a lot of trouble before the war began in late February 2026. And while there were a number of causes for that, too, the overwhelming, number one reason was the disastrous Trump tariffs. I walked through the polling on this in great detail back in May. It’s not just that Trump’s approval ratings were already quite bad at the time. It’s that his approval on the economy and inflation/cost of living were well below his overall approval ratings. Beating Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on those issues was at the very heart of how Trump won in 2024. And he blew a giant hole through the public’s trust in him. The polling up to that point showed as well that the tariffs were roundly unpopular, so it’s not as if voters were unhappy with the short-term effects but trusted the long-term plan. Moreover, even in May 2026 (when the war was already beginning to weary people), Trump’s ratings on the economy and inflation were still much worse than on foreign policy.
(At the time, we heard people dismissing all this on the grounds that the polls should not be trusted. After last night, it’s clear that all those months of flashing warning lights were 0n target.)
Even now, look at Trump’s approval rating on RealClearPolitics: It’s at 39.1 percent approval to 59.1 percent disapproval, but 32.9 percent approval to 64.7 percent disapproval on the economy and 27.1 percent approval to 70.4 percent disapproval (!!!) on inflation — marks even lower than his 33.7 approval and 62.3 percent disapproval on foreign policy and 32.6 percent approval and 63.5 percent disapproval on Iran.
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, 54 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. Only on immigration did those voters break Republican. They can’t all be equally crucial — and if you isolate crucial issues from major issues, the cost of living still beat the Iran war, 49 percent to 34 percent.
When actually asked to rank the issues, 39 percent said the economy, 32 percent said “democracy,” 14 percent said immigration, 8 percent said health care, 4 percent said foreign policy, and 3 percent said crime. And of the people who ranked foreign policy first, Republicans won those voters by 50 percent to 46 percent. Voters preferred Democrats to Republicans 43 percent to 37 percent on the economy, a slightly wider spread than the Democrats’ 44 percent to 39 percent spread on foreign policy.
Asked specifically about tariffs, voters said by an overwhelming 65 percent to 22 percent margin that they have hurt rather than helped the national economy, a spread that widened even further to 63 percent hurt and just 15 percent helped regarding the local economy where voters actually live. Which means that of the small share of voters who believe in the tariffs, about a third of them do so only in the abstract, and see no benefit in their own communities. That’s not a great place to be politically.
The two issues of tariffs and Iran can’t be entirely separated, because they both played into the same problem: Trump lost the trust of voters on the cost of living, and compounded the issue by appearing callously unconcerned with how his policies were hitting voters. That was made worse by Trump and his family and inner circle conspicuously high on the hog from public office, raking in vast fortunes from the United Arab Emirates and having a lavish wedding for Donald Trump Jr. paid for by a Russian oligarch. Here’s the thing: The public may not like paying more at the pump for a war, but they will tolerate it if you make the case that it’s a temporary thing for a national security purpose. If you want to make that case, you need to be a trustworthy spokesman. Not only is Trump not that, and not only did he barely try: He had also spent the entire previous year torching his credibility on cost-of-living issues by pursuing a deliberate economic policy aimed at driving up consumer costs. It wasn’t the Iran war that had Trump telling people in 2025 to go buy fewer toys for their kids for Christmas. Michael argues on X that the economy got worse in terms of the consumer price index in 2026 than in 2025, but even aside from the fact that the CPI doesn’t necessarily measure the full effect of tariffs, that doesn’t address the fact that voters were already furious about the issue.
So, yes, we should consider the Iran war a major factor in what happened to Republicans in the 2026 elections. And we should think hard about electing leaders who don’t think clearly about strategy or communicate effectively before going to war. But it is whistling past the electoral graveyard to ignore the massive political own-goal and liability of the Trump tariffs or to pretend that nothing else needs to be learned but to change our policies on war.