Breitbart Business Digest: It Wasn't the Tariffs. It Was the Forever War.

What Really Drove the GOP Midterm Losses? The fanatical foes of tariffs have been loudly announcing their explanation for the much larger-than-expected Republican election losses in this week’s midterm elections to anyone who will listen. Naturally, it’s the tariffs. This was inevitable. Economists and pundits who spent the past year and a half wedded to their disastrous forecasts that President Donald Trump’s trade policies would wreck the economy were hardly going to let an election defeat go to waste. They had been frustrated at every turn of the economic data as productivity improved, tariffs contributed almost nothing to inflation, employment rose, output soared, and investment boomed. In the midterm election rout of the GOP there was, at last, something they could blame on tariffs. There’s just one problem. The polling data doesn’t fit their story any better than the economic data did. The Economist/YouGov poll has tracked Trump’s economic approval throughout his second term. After an early decline, his net approval—the share approving minus the share disapproving—settled around minus 10 in June of 2025. By October 2026, it was minus 36. That’s a deterioration of 26 points. If tariffs did that, we should be able to find some evidence that Americans were turning against them as Trump’s economic ratings sank. Looking at the polls, however, we find something quite different. Tariffs did not become less popular this year, but approval of Trump’s economy fell sharply. And the most serious decline happened as it settled in to the minds of many Americans that the war on Iran was not going to be a brief affair. The Tariffs Had Already Taken Their Toll Let’s get the obvious point out of the way. Tariffs divided the public from the very start. The Democrats had been so confident in their unpopularity that they centered their 2024 messaging against Trump’s tariffs. The media launched a non-stop attack against the policy, backed up by countless economists armed with deeply flawed studies that purported to show the tariffs harmed the U.S. economy. The week after Liberation Day, 36 percent of Americans approved and 52 percent disapproved of the policy. Forty-eight percent said they supported keeping or raising tariffs, a slightly different way of asking about support for tariffs. A good deal of the opposition was partisanship. Although the Democratic Party opposed tariffs back when it was the party of slavery, in recent decades it was not monolithically in favor of so-called free trade. In fact, this divided the party for many years, although the globalist wing typically won the day. Fast forward to the Trump era, and the Democrats became just as anti-tariff as they were when they were the party of John C. Calhoun. Or even more so. On Liberation Day, 36 percent of Democrats said tariffs should be increased or kept the same. In the most recent Economist/YouGov poll, just 16 percent said they favored keeping or raising the tariffs. Among Republicans, however, tariffs were and still are wildly popular. Seventy-two percent approved when the tariffs were launched. By June 2026, 72 percent still approved. The signature trade policy of a Republican president retained the support of nearly three out of four Republicans. This is the Party of McKinley again. Importantly, tariffs were hardly uniquely unpopular with voters. Trump’s signature domestic achievement actually fared considerably worse. From April through July 2025, support for the One Big Beautiful Bill ran between 30 and 36 percent. Support for keeping or raising tariffs ran between 41 and 48 percent. More Americans wanted to preserve or increase the tariffs than supported the tax bill. This is a hard message for many traditional Republicans to digest, but there it is: tariffs are more popular than many traditional GOP positions. That matters when explaining a Republican election defeat. There was no Republican revolt against tariffs. And among the broader public, opposition had largely stopped growing long before Trump’s economic ratings hit bottom. Approval of Trump’s handling of tariffs stood at 37 percent from late April 2025 through January 2026. It fell to 33 percent after the Supreme Court ruled against them in February and has since hovered around 31 to 32 percent. But that modest decline does not explain a collapse in his economic standing. Ask Americans whether tariffs should be increased, kept the same, or decreased, and the pattern is similar. Support for keeping or raising them fell from 48 percent to 37 percent in the first five months. Most of that was because of the mounting Democrat opposition to tariffs and some Democrat-leaning independents increasingly opposing tariffs. But six months after Liberation Day, the support for higher tariffs stopped declining—mostly because the Democrats had gone as far as it was possible to go down the road of opposition. In August 2026, it stood at 38 percent—a point higher than where it was in January. So you cannot explain the continuing decline in the public’s approval of Trump’s handling of the economy by pointing to an opinion that had largely stopped changing and whose shift was almost entirely partisan. The Forever War So what did drive down Trump’s approval rating on the economy? The most likely culprit: the transformation of the attack on Iran’s leadership and military capabilities into a prolonged conflict that raised gasoline prices through the spring, summer, and fall. A view of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy warship struck by a U.S. missile, off the coast of Bandar Abbas, Iran, on September 9, 2026. (Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images) It wasn’t the attack itself. When U.S. and Israeli strikes began on February 28, Trump’s net economic approval was minus 21. In early April, it was minus 20. Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz. Consumer prices rose at an annualized rate of nearly 11 percent in March, entirely due to soaring gasoline prices. Yet Trump’s economic standing had barely budged. Americans appeared willing to bear the costs of a short war. But somehow the short war kept going. The April 7 ceasefire was followed by a U.S. naval blockade on April 13 and Iran’s renewed closure of Hormuz on April 18. By early May, American destroyers were taking fire from the Revolutionary Guard. Ceasefires, negotiations, and hostilities ebbed and flowed, becoming more like a regular tide than a storm surge. Americans’ expectations for the war shifted along with the war itself. When the war started, the share expecting it to last at least another year was just 32 percent. This rose to 37 percent in mid-May, 46 percent in July, and 52 percent in September. Between early May and early June, Trump’s net economic approval plunged from minus 24 to minus 34. By October, it was negative 36. The war continued, and his economic standing never recovered. In short, the initial attack had not broken Trump’s economic ratings. Neither had the first burst of war inflation. The damage came as Americans realized that the promised quick victory was turning into another open-ended commitment. Another forever war. A sticker of President Donald Trump points to a diesel fuel price displayed on a BP gas station pump on October 31, 2026, in Kansas City, Kansas. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images) From a Midterm Loss to a Rout The tariff critics would like this election to vindicate their economic forecasts. It does not. Opposition to tariffs had largely stabilized before Trump’s economic ratings suffered their sharpest deterioration. That deterioration came when the Iran war dragged on. The White House agrees with this assessment. “The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance wrote Wednesday. “The president himself said so last night.” Asked about Vance’s assessment, Trump agreed. “Well, I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit, short term,” he told reporters. He defended the decision nonetheless: “If I had it to do again, I’d have to do it again because long term, it’s the only answer.” The thing that turned an ordinary midterm loss into a rout was the transformation of the Iran conflict into an unpopular forever war.