I’m not commenting here on the great tariffs-vs.-war debate (although I will repeat my prior assertion that the balance of the evidence suggests that both harmed Republicans, and the war harmed them more).
I just want to point out a feature of the data that isn’t especially helpful to either side. MBD posts a chart on real wage data that starts going negative as soon as the war begins. Note, though, that the chart uses annual data: It compares the average wage each month to the average wage one year earlier. That’s entirely normal. But it can, and in this case does, provide a misleading picture.
If you look at real wages each month, you see that it rises to a peak in November 2025, drops the next month, comes back to the peak in January 2026, stays flat in February, drops in March, April, and May, rises a lot in June, rises a little in July, then drops in August and September. (That’s all the data we have.)
The trend of rising average wages can fairly be said to have stopped in November 2025. If that’s a story about tariffs, it’s not an obvious one. But it’s not an Iran-war story, either.