Paxton’s win, with Trump’s support, in an intramural GOP contest tells us nothing about how the broad public views the war.
At his cabinet meeting today, President Trump had some bracing things to say about the Iran war, which, he noted, he calls a “conflict” — at least sometimes (compare, e.g., Trump’s June 16 statement: “But I’d say Iran is not winning this war.”). I’ve pointed out that the president’s eschewal of the word war is an effort to avoid triggering Congress’s war powers — an effort of diminishing effectiveness, as we’re likely to see when lawmakers return from their Memorial Day respite and renew attempts to pass a war powers resolution against continued combat operations against Iran (for which Democrats may now have the votes).
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Trump said the Iranian regime was miscalculating if it thought, based on political concerns, that he’d be open to a deal to end the “conflict” on terms unfavorable to the United States. Iranian officials “thought they were going to outwait me,” he observed, under the misimpression that his concerns about the conflict’s unpopularity, with the midterms on the horizon, would induce him to accept their demands. Trump countered, “I don’t care about the midterms. Look what happened last night.”
That seemed to be a reference to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s GOP primary victory over that state’s incumbent senator, John Cornyn, after Trump endorsed Paxton. It’s an odd thing to say. The implication is that if Trump cared about the midterms, he’d have backed Cornyn, who had a significantly better chance to win the November general election — i.e., by endorsing the scandal-plagued Paxton, Trump realizes that he helped the Democrats, who were also pulling for Paxton and are unified in opposition to his Iran venture.
The president also theorized that Paxton’s victory after his endorsement showed that, even though the war is polling badly, the American people “understand it — they know that, very simply, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I’m doing that for the world.”
To the contrary, the war is unpopular principally because Trump failed to make a public case for why it is necessary; hence its strongest supporters are members of the Trump political base, only about 37 percent of the electorate. Paxton won on Tuesday night because Trump’s base is dominant in intramural Republican races. By contrast, the midterm elections in November will be decided by the full electorate, which is unfavorably disposed toward both the president and the war by nearly the same margin — roughly 59 to 37 percent.
Paxton’s win does not tell us anything about how voters in general view the war.