Trump’s Tariffs, Not Just the Iran War, Fueled Republican Midterm Losses

We may be reaching the point of diminishing returns in my now-lengthy argument with Michael Brendan Dougherty on the relative contribution of the tariffs, the , and other factors to . But Michael’s lengthy latest reply, under the title “What Caused the Blowout? The War” deserves a few further comments for its renewed effort to claim that Republicans would have lost nearly nothing of any consequence on Election Day without the war. If this is by now deep in the weeds, it is also, in my view, exactly the sort of debate for which National Review exists.

Stripped of appeals to authority, a lot of this comes down to quibbling with my timeline. Michael contests my account of how the timing of the collapse of public trust in Trump’s management of the economy preceded the war and largely coincided with the lurch into global trade war. Specifically, he implies that there is something wrong or even dishonest with me looking at Trump’s standing on Election Day 2018 as one of my data points (ignoring that I also looked at Trump’s strong standing on the issue at the end of his first term). What Michael omits to mention is that I cited 2018 as a baseline precisely because he himself, in a prior post, had sought to discredit my previous analysis by insisting, “I’m searching for an explanation for why 2026 is so much worse than 2018.” I answered his question with data showing that there is a very obvious and robustly supported explanation for that.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

Featured Tags

We may be reaching the point of diminishing returns in my now-lengthy argument with Michael Brendan Dougherty on the relative contribution of the tariffs, the , and other factors to . But Michael’s lengthy latest reply, under the title “What Caused the Blowout? The War” deserves a few further comments for its renewed effort to claim that Republicans would have lost nearly nothing of any consequence on Election Day without the war. If this is by now deep in the weeds, it is also, in my view, exactly the sort of debate for which National Review exists.

Stripped of appeals to authority, a lot of this comes down to quibbling with my timeline. Michael contests my account of how the timing of the collapse of public trust in Trump’s management of the economy preceded the war and largely coincided with the lurch into global trade war. Specifically, he implies that there is something wrong or even dishonest with me looking at Trump’s standing on Election Day 2018 as one of my data points (ignoring that I also looked at Trump’s strong standing on the issue at the end of his first term). What Michael omits to mention is that I cited 2018 as a baseline precisely because he himself, in a prior post, had sought to discredit my previous analysis by insisting, “I’m searching for an explanation for why 2026 is so much worse than 2018.” I answered his question with data showing that there is a very obvious and robustly supported explanation for that.