The predictions were bad, and the results were worse. Republicans suffered a defeat unlike anything an American party has seen in decades. The soul-searching that follows will shape the party’s recovery, so I’ve broken this analysis into three parts: what went wrong, where things are headed, and how Republicans should start adjusting now for the next election.
The first part, the diagnosis, is probably the most important. It may also be the hardest. Every party has warring factions, and each will try to pin the loss on its rivals.
Let me show you. Yesterday morning, Vice President JD Vance posted a long thread on X. Citing his own team of election analysts, he laid out four reasons Republicans lost: the Iran war, a failure to focus on affordability, a failure to put America first, and a failure to rethink the US-Israel relationship. Three of the four are really variations on the first, which makes clear that Vance sees the Iran war as the main culprit.
Notably, Vance has set himself apart from the Trump administration largely through his positions on Iran and Israel. He opposed military intervention, favored diplomacy, and pushed for more distance from Jerusalem.
In other words, his diagnosis conveniently vindicates his own positions and makes the case that he should be rewarded, politically, for having been right. But personal ambitions should not be involved in a neutral analysis of the midterm elections. Again, getting the diagnosis right is the most important task after an election. Get it wrong, and Republicans lose the next one too.
President Trump offered a simpler explanation: the Iran war raised gas prices, voters didn’t like the prices, and that’s that. He also said he doesn’t regret the war and would do it again, meaning he understood the electoral harm, but believed he was accomplishing a historic duty.
So let’s get into it.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Is JD Vance, along with the more isolationist wing of the Republican Party, right that the party lost because of President Trump’s war with Iran? As I heard the claim repeated by one commentator after another in the Vice President’s camp, I found it hard to believe.
When Americans turned against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, the backlash was impossible to miss: mass student protests, riots, and violent clashes with police. Given the death toll, that reaction made sense. If voters had truly rejected Trump over Iran, wouldn’t we have likely seen something similar?
Of course, Americans were not dying in droves, and there was no mandatory draft, but if voters truly mobilized because of the war efforts against Iran, wouldn’t we have had at least one major protest? The largest protest related to the war was a “No Kings” protest, which was mostly organized against the administration's immigration policy and ICE raids.
The election-day polling tells the same story. Iran does show up as a major issue, but it ranks well below the usual concerns: affordability, the economy, healthcare, gas prices, and, notably, “democracy and corruption.”
There’s no question the Iran war did more than Trump’s tariffs to drive up gas prices and push inflation higher. Before the war, annual inflation stood at 2.4 percent, with core inflation near its lowest level since 2021, even with the tariffs in place.
The tariffs, by contrast, didn’t raise prices as much as many economists had feared. Gas averaged just under $3 a gallon before the war; by mid-October, AAA had it at $4.34.
But to say Americans rejected the war itself, a campaign against a clear adversary aimed at ending its nuclear ambitions, misses the point entirely.
Americans were unhappy with the economy well before the war began. Young people, who shifted away from Republicans in this election more than any other group, have long been demoralized by rising costs, shrinking job prospects in the face of AI, and a housing market that feels out of reach.
Voters, too, rejected the inflationary Biden economy in 2024 and hoped President Trump and the Republicans could turn it around. Two years later, that hasn’t happened. So when voters rejected the Iran war, they weren’t rejecting it on ideological grounds. They were rejecting what it symbolized.
Here’s what I mean: voters punished an administration that focused on foreign policy while economic problems at home went unaddressed. They didn’t reject the Iran war on its merits. The same goes for the US-Israel relationship. It has clearly become less popular, but not mainly on its merits. Voters soured on it for the same reason: an administration chasing goals abroad while leaving problems at home unresolved.
That’s where I part ways with the Vice President. He’s right that Iran hurt Republicans, but wrong about why. In his telling, the war was a mistake. But the correct takeaway is that Republican priorities as a whole were the mistake. The Iran War simply came to symbolize that.
Iran wasn’t what kept voters home or sent them to vote against Republicans. What did was an administration that let economic concerns at home go unaddressed, poured its attention into foreign policy, and communicated poorly throughout.
The polling points to plenty of other reasons, but they share a common thread. Trump came in, even the second time, as an outsider who would fix the economy. Two years later, voters saw an insider with the wrong priorities, enriching himself and his family while doing little to fix their problems.
The AP Voter Poll found that about two-thirds of voters said Trump doesn’t have the right priorities, and the overwhelming majority of them backed Democrats for the House.
Hispanic voters swung back largely because of the optics of his deportation campaign. Only about a third backed the Republicans in their House race, down from roughly 4 in 10 who voted for Trump in 2024. In a September NBC News/Telemundo poll, 67 percent of Latino voters said Trump’s immigration enforcement had gone too far.
Many former MAGA supporters either stayed home or voted for Democrats, persuaded by the Tucker Carlson wing of the movement that the President was protecting Jeffrey Epstein and those close to him, taking orders from Israel, and ultimately sacrificing the country to protect the powerful.
Republicans and Democrats alike watched Trump fixate on a White House ballroom, whose estimated cost doubled from $200 million to $400 million as the project grew, and a renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that topped $14 million and was soon plagued by peeling sealant and algae. All the while, the war was faltering and prices were climbing.
And reports of the Trump family pulling in billions through foreign deals many saw as corrupt animated voters across the country. More than half of voters said government corruption was crucial to their vote. The president made more than $1 billion last year from meme coins and cryptocurrencies, and most voters saw him as consumed by his own interests.
Voters — including those in deep Republican areas — also pushed back on the administration’s embrace of AI data centers. Trump and his AI czar, David Sacks, spent the year pushing for more of them, even as 63 percent of registered voters said they’d oppose one within 10 miles of their home and just 13 percent would support one.
On Election Day, voters in nearly 40 localities passed bans or tighter rules on data centers. In Hubbard, Ohio, more than three-quarters voted to ban them, despite Trump touting his AI agenda at a nearby rally in October.
Healthcare cut the same way. In the NBC News exit poll, 55 percent of voters said Trump’s policies had made their healthcare costs worse, and voters trusted Democrats over Republicans on the issue by 19 points.
None of this was due to a lack of power. Republicans controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate. With a trifecta, the party had every lever it needed to deliver on costs, healthcare, and the economy, and it didn’t.
Finally, the party ran weak candidates whose main qualification was Trump’s favor. In Texas, Trump endorsed Ken Paxton, the impeached and acquitted attorney general, over Sen. John Cornyn, despite Cornyn’s warnings that Paxton could put the seat at risk. Democrat James Talarico won with about 55 percent of the vote, becoming the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Texas since 1988.
In South Carolina, after Sen. Lindsey Graham’s death in July, Trump publicly urged the governor to appoint his sister, Darline, to the seat, then endorsed her and campaigned for her. About 6 in 10 South Carolina voters said she lacked the right experience to serve, and she lost in a state that hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998.
To be sure, the Trump administration has real accomplishments from its second term. It sealed the border: preliminary figures show about 98,700 southwest border apprehensions in fiscal 2026, which the administration called the lowest annual total in US history, down from more than 1.8 million a year under Biden.
It ramped deportations back up, and it rolled back woke policies in schools and governments across the country. Even in defeat, voters gave Republicans the edge on immigration. But the administration failed to fix the country’s economic problems, and it failed to explain why relief never came.
The Vice President and the Tucker Carlsons of the party would love to have America believe Republicans lost solely because of the Iran war, since that would make them the heirs apparent to the next era of the GOP. But the evidence says otherwise.
And that faction did more than misdiagnose the loss; it helped bring it about. In June, Carlson declared he was out and wouldn’t support Republicans in the midterms, predicting that plenty of others would follow him.
On Election Day, the Tucker Carlson Network told its followers to remember that “gas Israeli expensive,” implying that they should vote against Republicans. Days before, Tucker Carlson had released a long memo, with no sources, that the President was about to start a nuclear war with Iran.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Many MAGA and conservative policies are still popular, despite the losses: the border policies, deporting violent criminals, ending racial preferences in hiring, keeping transgenderism out of sports and government, election integrity reforms, and more.
And with party loyalty dropping, as this year’s swing shows, Republicans could bring voters back in a few years, especially if Democrats misread their win and embrace the more radical congressmen and senators headed to Washington. (With their statewide wins, Democrats could now theoretically end the Electoral College.)
Still, many of the problems that brought Republicans to this defeat will fade, along with the Trump family’s dominance over American politics. But Republicans, and whoever shapes the future of the GOP, need to draw the right lessons from this defeat.
Voters aren’t begging for a foreign policy 180, or a return to Obama-style appeasement of adversaries bent on our destruction. They just want to know their government is focused on them and on the issues that make them safer and more prosperous.
