You could hardly design an issue better to destroy Republican fortunes.
What was the difference between a regular or even serious midterm defeat and the disaster we saw? It was the war. I don’t even think this is controversial at this point. It’s certainly not a conspiracy launched by underhanded members of Team Vance, as is now alleged across social media, by those who are allowing their ideological priors to blind them. That the war caused the bottom to fall out is the consensus from pollsters left and right, and from pro–Iran war pollsters in the White House campaign operation.
Dan has been generous enough to let me have the last word on my own position, stated the night of the election, that the war was the primary explanation for the Republican blowout, even if everything else — candidate selection, tariffs and their chaotic rollout, ICE controversies, DOGE, corruption — all played a serious role. So now that we’re getting into the nitty gritty, Dan and I agree on quite a bit. We agree Trump started losing ground early, that the tariffs hurt, and that the war made things worse. The important part is what turned a rebuke into a rout.
The argument, which is wider than the two of us, got started on Election Night and centered on the exit polls rating the tariffs, which is why I pointed to the unpopularity of Trump’s other economic policies. The tariffs were never uniquely disliked among them. Since then, the argument has moved to a priori grounds — tariffs are meant to raise prices, and voters were angry about the cost of living, ergo tariffs are to blame. When Trump took office, inflation was at 2.4 percent. The prices voters resented were already there. By February 2026, after a year of the tariff fights, inflation was at . . . 2.4 percent. Something sent it to 4.2 percent, though. If cost of living is what really angered voters, the policy that drove it upwards, and hammered Republicans, is the one that raised the price of everything: the war. The war was also seen by some crucial blocs of voters as a betrayal.
Dan moves the argument to Trump’s overall handling of the economy, since that is what voters actually punish. That’s true! And Dan’s numbers are useful. In the fall of 2019 Trump was eight points above water on the economy. Through March 4 2020, he was dead even 46.2 percent approval, 46.2 percent disapproval. DOGE was tat the top of the news, ICE raids were generating backlash. Tariffs were announced in a chaotic fashion, and there was a market panic in April. That’s all bad.
Dan’s argument is that Trump suffered more of his total overall decline from 2018 to the election before the war started. I’ll quote what I take to be the key paragraphs in his latest rejoinder.
In 183 polls taken between “liberation day” 2025 and the start of the Iran war, Trump’s approval on the economy averaged 41.5 percent approval and 54.5 percent disapproval. And things were not recovering: averaging 22 polls taken in the month before the war, Trump was down to 39.9 percent approval against 56 percent disapproval, a 16.1 point deficit. He was double digits underwater in 19 of the 22 polls, and 20 points underwater in seven of them. To repeat: Trump suffered a net 24.5 point decline on the economy between Election Day 2018 and the start of the Iran war. Yuge!
Did things get even worse once the war started? Absolutely. In 120 polls taken since the start of the war, Trump’s average approval on the economy has been 35.6 percent, compared with 60.5 percent, a ghastly 25-point deficit. Only seven polls in that period showed him less than double digits underwater. As we saw from the final averages, the bottom really fell out under the campaign’s final month.
Let’s look at that more closely. Dan’s conclusion is that voters lost their trust in Trump on the economy “when he launched a sweeping tariff war” and that “much more” of the damage was done before the war than after it. An uncareful reader might come away thinking that the tariffs cost Trump 24.5 points on economic approval. But Dan slips between two different time periods, so his numbers don’t show that the tariff-to-war period did “much more” damage than the war-to-election period. The 24.5 figure runs from Election Day 2018. Trump slid five points by the time he left office, during Covid and after January 6. He slid more than three more points before the first reciprocal tariffs were announced. So, when Dan says that Trump’s economic approval slid more before the war, we’re talking about 16.1 points over nearly twelve months, against a postwar slide of 15.7 points in the final eight months. It helps to visualize it.
This chart was created using Dan’s numbers:
The “Yuge!” number Dan cites is real. But more than one-third of it preceded the tariffs. I know that protectionists sometimes claim tariffs do more than they can do, but I don’t think they can have a profound political effect starting five years before they exist. What’s leftover isn’t “much more” than the postwar damage at all.
That 15.7 number shown in red is, yes, 0.4 percent smaller than the orange one. So Dan’s right that the prewar tariff-era effect is (very slightly) bigger. But the post-war number reflects a steeper and faster decline. In fact, each month in the war period adds more damage to the overall rating per month than the gap that exists between the orange bar and red bar. From “liberation day” to the February resumption of war with Iran, Trump was losing 1.3 points on economic approval a month. After the war, it was two points a month. Sure, everything else is happening in the background too. But the drop after the war is where the blowout lives, and the blowout was caused by it. This isn’t a private reading from underhanded Vance-guard wreckers or people with an obvious agenda, but more like the consensus across the political spectrum.
Democrats read the election this way. In a post-election interview with Vox‘s Eric Levitz, David Shor of Blue Rose Research said that Republicans were destined for an ordinary midterm loss until Trump started (or restarted) the Iran war. Shor says that Trump’s sturdy approval floor was what made the Senate look out of reach for Democrats. The war caused a “collapsing Jenga effect,” according to Shor. It was unpopular itself. It wrecked Trump’s numbers on the economy, and it made voters more attentive to corruption.
Sean Trende, not a Trumper or Vance partisan, offered a very sound post-election analysis concluding that everything mattered, even things that seemed less consequential at the time, like policy defeats for MAHA, or the disaffection of Marjorie Taylor Greene. He thinks the tariffs — particularly the rollout — did more harm than anything in Trump’s first year. But there’s something of greater consequence. He writes:
Before the war, Trump was probably headed toward a normal midterm loss, with a job approval in the mid-to-low 40s. Keeping the Senate seems likely in this world, and the House might even have stayed Republican
This is how James Blair, the White House’s own pollster and a supporter of the Iran war, saw the numbers. His summer-slide deck tied Democrats’ advantage on the generic ballot directly to the war timeline. Their edge grew during active hostilities, then narrowed when the cease-fire came in during the Memorandum of Understanding. After that broke and hostilities resumed, Trump’s approval crashed. All the negative effects are cumulative, but we have the evidence that voters connected costs of living to the war.
From the New York Times:
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]
Because of the war, gas went from $2.98 a gallon to $4.15 on Election Day. Diesel went far higher. Here’s a chart from David Shor.
Before the war, Trump looks like he’s getting close to going above 50 percent on gas prices. The effect of the war is immediate and disastrous.
As Dan says in his own post, the bottom fell out late. But that cuts toward my argument that the war was the most consequential factor driving this to a blowout. The last stretch matters more because, in wave elections, the results get much, much worse at the margins. The last five points you drop have an outsized effect.
Shor’s analysis mirrors the one from Blair (and which was articulated by the vice president) finding that young, Hispanic, and infrequent voters swung back to toward the Democrats. These were the very groups that moved toward Trump in 2024. Most of them did not decide their midterm votes in April 2025. They’re the most likely to evaluate conditions in October 2026.
We could retreat to a priori arguments. Voters were angered by the cost of living, and tariffs are a policy of raising prices. That’s true. And I don’t deny that some voters were angry about the tariffs. But what we see in the numbers, in Blair’s analysis, is that voters absolutely connected rising prices to the war. They are correct to do so.
Unlike the tariffs, the war with Iran was seen by voters and many MAGA voices who have influence with them as a betrayal of a campaign promise. The war also sucked up time and attention that could have been spent on any other parts of an affordability agenda. The war amounted to a betrayal of a core promise, distracted the administration from pursuit of a more popular agenda, and immediately, markedly worsened the very problem that voters weakly attached to the party wanted the president to solve. You could hardly design an issue better to destroy Republican fortunes.
One could argue that tariffs drained away a reserve of support, and the war only finished the job. Theoretically, it is true that being in a weakened state makes one more vulnerable to shocks. But this isn’t an exogenous shock. We have every indication that this was a war of choice, driven by intelligence officers, advisers, and a president who thought the conflict would be short, sharp, and decisive — an opportunity to quickly realize upside. This was not a war driven of dire necessity. A war driven by an obvious provocation is exactly the kind of war that would get enough public support to drive Congress to vote for it. The Iran war wasn’t that.
Yes, Dan is correct that the twelve-month pre-war drop in Trump’s approval after he passed the tariffs is just barely larger than the post-war drop, not much more. But the drop in the eight months since February 28 is steeper, faster, and far more consequential for elections. The war, more than tariffs, drove costs upward and in the most visible way, at the gas pump.
Shor and Trende, two of the most respected election analysts, one Democratic , and one Republican — neither invested in a Vance-led future — suggest that without the war, Republicans might have held the Senate. Given that Republican chances to recapture the Senate in the next two election cycles have now cratered after this debacle, that’s no small thing.
Yes, the Republican loss is cumulative and “multifactoral,” and there are lots of things to correct at the policy level, and in the execution, tone, professionalism, ranking of priorities, and on and on. But the reason Republicans suffered a historic repudiation rather than a normal or simply serious midterm loss comes down to the war.