Don’t mention the war: how Iran broke Trump’s winning coalition

In the classic Fawlty Towers episode, Basil Fawlty, hotel proprietor and concussed anglophile, spends an evening ordering his staff not to mention the war in front of his German guests, and then mentions it in every other sentence. Watching the Republican Party’s 2026 campaign, I kept thinking of Basil. For eight months, the White House, the party’s campaign committees and their friends in the conservative media worked hard at not mentioning the war with Iran. The voters, it turns out, mentioned it for them. The numbers are not subtle. According to the NBC exit poll, 74% of voters said the Iran war was a “crucial” or “major” factor in their vote for Congress, and Democrats won 63% of them. About the same share, 62%-63%, said military action against Iran was the wrong decision. Democrats took the House and the Senate, flipping seats in places where a Democratic Senate win used to need a scandal or a miracle: Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa and North Carolina, along with Michigan and Maine. The day after, Vice President JD Vance, who had loyally defended the war, told the world on X: “The reason we lost is the war.” President Trump called that “largely true,” before adding that he would do it all again. The blip that ate the midterms It is worth recalling what Washington’s wise men and women were telling us. When the US and Israel launched their strikes on February 28, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and opening what was supposed to be a short, clean campaign, House Speaker Mike Johnson predicted the war would be “wrapped up soon” and described it as a “blip” in political terms. Mark Levin, the president’s confidant and Israel’s most devoted radio advocate, assured listeners in September that Iran was a “4 percent issue.” Another pundit predicted in the spring that by November the war would be a mild footnote. The footnote swallowed the text. Iran did what every Pentagon war game since the 1980s said it would do: it went after the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf energy infrastructure. Oil went over US$100 a barrel, gasoline went over $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022, and the war that was supposed to restore American credibility in the Middle East turned into a tax on every commuter in Ohio and every farmer buying diesel and fertilizer in Iowa. Foreign policy, we are told, never decides American elections. It does when it shows up at the gas pump. The Republican strategy, such as it was, consisted of pretending this wasn’t happening. The party’s two campaign committees left the war to the White House and ran on the border and government spending. GOP candidates in tight races tried to have it both ways, calling for a “swift end” to the war while pledging trust in the commander in chief to finish the job by force if needed. Voters are not as dumb as campaign consultants think. If you cannot explain why your country is at war, the least you can do is not pretend it isn’t. The America First voters who noticed The deeper story is about the coalition Trump built. In 2016 and again in 2024, he won over working-class voters, many of them in rural and small-town America, in part by promising to end the “stupid wars” that the Bushes, the neoconservatives and the bipartisan foreign policy establishment had dragged them into. These voters, who sent their sons and daughters to Iraq and Afghanistan, took the promise seriously. Many of them still do. What they discovered in 2026 is that the promise came with an asterisk: no stupid wars, except the one Benjamin Netanyahu had been lobbying Washington to fight for two decades. That is why the most interesting results came not from the suburbs but from farm country. In Iowa, Democrats ran what amounted to an America First antiwar message, blaming Trump’s war for the cost of living. It worked. The so-called restrainers on the right had warned since March that the war violated the commitments the MAGA coalition was built on. They were treated as cranks or worse. They now look like the only people on the right who read the electorate correctly. The neoconservatives, of course, have drawn the opposite lesson. In their reading, the problem was not that America went to war with Iran but that it didn’t fight the war hard enough. This is the same school of thought that explained the Iraq quagmire by the absence of a “surge” and the Afghan collapse by a lack of “resolve.” There is no defeat that cannot be turned into an argument for more of the same. Expect to hear it from think tanks that have never paid for a tank of gas with their own money. Washington’s favorite scapegoat game Now the blame game begins. People close to the White House are pointing at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for getting the timelines and the goals wrong, and there is talk of replacing him. Thomas Massie, who lost his primary in May for the sin of opposing the war, wants a House vote on impeaching Hegseth. All of this misses the point. Hegseth did not decide to go to war. The president did, cheered on by a Congress that never voted to authorize it and by an Israeli government that wanted it. And consider the timing. In the final week of the campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington had told Gulf allies to brace for a “short, intense military campaign” after the election. On the eve of the vote, US forces struck Iran’s Qeshm Island near the Strait of Hormuz. Netanyahu reportedly wanted to resume the war before Israelis went to the polls; Trump preferred to wait for the midterms. The plan, in other words, was to not mention the war until the votes were counted, and then resume it. The voters got there first. In Israel, too, Netanyahu’s Likud lost its majority in the October 27 election. When two democracies hand their war leaders a rebuke within a week, it’s worth asking whether the people know something the policymakers don’t. Nor should we miss the irony that Tehran is now gloating. Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, declared that “Americans said NO TO WAR” and that Iran endorsed the message. A war launched to weaken the Islamic Republic has ended up handing its leaders a propaganda gift and a new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, with a martyr’s legitimacy his father never quite had. Will the Democrats become the peace party? Don’t count on it. I have seen this movie before. In 2006, voters angry about Iraq gave Democrats both houses of Congress, and the new majority proceeded to fund the war, accept the surge and leave the exit to the next president. The 2026 Democratic campaign was not, for the most part, an antiwar campaign. It was an affordability campaign that happened to have a war in it. Party leaders attacked the cost of the war at the pump, not the strategic logic behind it; many of them complained that the administration had failed to define “victory,” not that victory was undefinable. That is the language of people who want to manage a war better, not end it. There are exceptions. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan won after pro-Israel groups spent more than $40 million against him in the primary and the general election. Some Democrats now talk openly about reducing military aid to Israel, which would have been unthinkable in that party five years ago. Chuck Schumer has vowed to “end the war” through Congress’s power of the purse, and Hakeem Jeffries is urging Trump to end it before the new Congress convenes in January. Good, but the power of the purse only means something if you are willing to use it against a president who will veto any war-powers resolution you send him, and that will require Republican senators who, until Tuesday, couldn’t bring themselves to mention the war. The lesson nobody wants to learn The lesson of these midterms is not complicated, which is why Washington will work hard to miss it. Americans are not isolationists; they are not pacifists either. What they are is skeptical of wars of choice in the Middle East that are sold as quick and cheap, that serve a foreign government’s agenda more than their own, and that end up costing them every time they fill up their car. They punished the Republicans in 2006 for Iraq. They punished them again in 2026 for Iran. Twice is a pattern. The foreign policy establishment of both parties will tell you the election was about inflation, or turnout, or candidate quality, or anything else. They will insist, like Basil Fawlty, that they didn’t mention the war. They did. The voters noticed, and unless the people running the country start listening, the war will keep mentioning itself. Leon Hadar is a journalist, blogger, analyst, author and consultant. This article first appeared on his Global Zeitgeist Substack. Become a subscriber here.