‘It’s the war, stupid’: Dems sweep midterms on wave of voter anger

Republicans lose control of Congress with exit polls showing just how much Trump’s unpopular foreign policy played a role

Blaise Malley – Responsible Statecraft:

Democrats secured an overwhelming victory in the midterm elections on Tuesday in a stunning rebuke to President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, winning majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives. By midnight Democrats flipped six Senate seats — including in reliably red states like South Carolina, Texas, and Kansas. As of this morning, they added Michigan and Maine.

In a rare inversion of historical trends, foreign policy played a serious role in the results of Tuesday’s midterm elections. Exit polling showed 74% of voters said the Iran War was a “crucial” or “major” factor in their vote.

Exit polling also found that 62% of voters believed using military force against Iran was the “wrong decision.”

This all jibed with polls leading up to the midterms. Gallup reported last week that 77% of registered voters considered the situation in Iran “extremely” or “very important” to their vote, placing it among the top issues surveyed, alongside the economy and healthcare. A late-October NetChoice/Echelon Insights poll of six swing states found that “ending the war with Iran” was voters’ third most commonly-cited priority, behind only the cost of living and jobs.

“It’s the war stupid,” Stand Together Reid Smith quipped Tuesday night as results started coming in.

The political impact extends beyond those who explicitly identified the war as a priority. The other top issues that consistently rank above the war itself — namely concerns related to the cost of living — have been exacerbated by the war, making it difficult to untangle foreign policy questions from economic concerns.

“Foreign policy shapes voters’ lives every day, whether it’s the extra $20 they spend filling up their tank or the higher grocery bill that comes when diesel costs push up the price of shipping food,” Ryan O’Donnell, executive director at the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, told RS in an email. In the group’s polling, he added, launching the war in Iran topped the list of Trump administration policies that most concerned voters.

The war and its economic consequences are “the biggest story of the election,” Amber Duke, editor-in-chief of right-leaning news outlet Daily Caller, told RS on Tuesday, “As I talked to voters and GOP consultants in the months leading up to this election, it was clear that this was going to have a big impact on turning out reliable Democrat voters, pushing independents and moderates to Democratic candidates, and suppressing GOP enthusiasm.”

The war’s fallout reaches red America
Many Republicans recognized that the war and the economic fallout were likely electoral losers for the incumbent party. Some tried to split the difference by calling for a rapid end to the war while continuing to support President Donald Trump.

Democrats in Iowa, South Carolina, and other typically Republican states latched onto Trump’s winning 2024 message of “America First” in an effort to claim the antiwar mantle and blame Trump’s war for the affordability crisis. The economic fallout from the war has been particularly acute in rural America, where soaring fuel and fertilizer prices have become a major preoccupation for farmers. Some of the most farming-depending states, including Iowa, Texas, Kansas, and North Carolina, flipped from Republican to Democrat on Tuesday.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP nominee for Iowa’s open Senate seat, sought to distance herself from the conflict by calling for a swift end to the war while continuing to support Trump and insisting that she had confidence in his ability to conclude the war militarily if necessary. The Associated Press called the race for Democratic nominee Joshua Turek late on Tuesday night, with the state representative leading by nearly 5 percentage points with 91% of votes counted.

In North Carolina, a swing state that Trump carried by just over three points in 2024, Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley took a different approach. He eventually acknowledged that the war was hurting North Carolina farmers but maintained two weeks before the election “the Iran war ends when Iran agrees to not build a nuclear weapon.” Sitting Governor Roy Cooper defeated Whatley easily in a race that top GOP super PACs stopped spending on in October.

For some Republican strategists, the race recalled an earlier political miscalculation. Liz Mair, a Republican political strategist who backed a hawkish primary challenger to Republican Rep. Walter Jones in 2008 when the Iraq war was at its height, recalled assuming that military voters in Jones’s North Carolina district would favor the more hawkish candidate. Instead, Jones won comfortably.

“A hell of a lot of Republican voters were sour on the war,” she told RS, about that race in a state with one of the nation’s biggest military populations. Military and veterans weren’t uniformly where young consultant Liz assumed, and a tough lesson was learned– though apparently not by 2026’s GOP politicians,” she noted.

Duke fears that these lessons will not be learned by Republican party politicians and the establishment media ecosystem any time soon. “Many neoconservatives and Iran War hawks are taking zero accountability for cheering the president on in this war and insisting it would have zero electoral ramifications,” she told RS. “Those of us who warned this was a bad idea since February might feel vindicated, but having an honest conversation about foreign policy in the conservative movement will be difficult when the loudest voices refuse to state the obvious.”

Foreign policy fractures Democrats in Michigan
One of the most closely watched Senate races pitted former Republican House Rep. Mike Rogers against public health administrator Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. The race took a dramatic late turn Sunday when Rep. Haley Stevens —who lost a close, bruising primary contest against El-Sayed — endorsed Rogers after earlier endorsing El-Sayed and pledging to vote for him as recently as last Thursday.

According to early Wednesday morning reports, El-Sayed was declared the winner 52%-46% with 95% of the votes counted.

Much of the disagreement during the primary campaign concerned the U.S.-Israel relationship and the role of pro-Israel lobby groups in American politics. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s largest super PAC spent a record-breaking $30.6 million during the primary in an effort to defeat El-Sayed. Super PACs linked to AIPAC later spent at least $12.7 million against the Democratic nominee in the general election.

The last-minute crack-up between the Democratic candidates appeared driven in part by an ad, recently circulated by an independent supporter of El-Sayed’s, that blamed U.S. support for Israel for rising grocery prices. In an interview with CNN after her reversal, Stevens wondered why El-Sayed had an “obsession” with “overseas” countries.

The Michigan contest suddenly pitted two visions of Democratic foreign policy against each other. For some, the result reflected a broader desire for the party to reckon with the failed U.S. approach to the Middle East.

“Anybody trying to say that foreign policy, the Gaza genocide, and particularly the Iran war haven’t been decisive issues, is incompetent,” Bhavik Lathia, a Democratic strategist who worked as the battleground mobilization director on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, told RS.

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Lathia said, energy among Democratic voters felt higher than it had been two years ago, when Harris attempted to prove her foreign-policy bona fides by campaigning with people like former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, a staunch defender of Israel and, like her father, a proponent of an interventionist foreign policy. “All of the kind of ridiculous hawkish posturing we did as a campaign, honestly, it killed a lot of momentum we had,” he said. At the time of writing, El-Sayed led, but the race had not been called.

Whether Democrats can or will translate these electoral gains to try to make major changes to U.S. foreign policy is an open question.

But voters certainly delivered a resounding rebuke to a Republican Party that stood behind Trump’s war in Iran.

“The Iran War is the greatest political blunder in the last two decades at least,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh declared on X. “A catastrophically stupid decision.”