Neocons sprang into action this week amid the fallout from Tuesday’s historic Republican defeat in the midterms, pushing a theory of the election that’s completely divorced from reality. Their basic argument is that it wasn’t the costly and unpopular Iran War that turned voters against President Trump and the GOP, it was tariffs, corruption, candidate quality, ICE raids — nearly anything you can think of besides the war, which they are still defending amid the smoldering wreckage of the Republican Party.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board, a champion of the war from the beginning, went after Vice President J.D. Vance this week for a lengthy X post on Wednesday in which Vance rightly cited the war as the primary cause of the Republican midterm disaster.
“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.”
The WSJ editors are not interested in an honest conversation. They criticized Vance for not mentioning corruption and tariffs as major reasons for Republican losses. Tariffs in particular is a familiar refrain among all those who pushed for the Iran war. The problem is, public opinion on tariffs doesn’t show what the neocons say it shows. After Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs were enacted on April 2 of last year, Trump’s approval rating dropped from 47 percent down to about where it was during the best times of his first term, about 40 percent, which is Trump’s baseline on economic management.
The entire tariffs talking point is just a tactic to distract from the Iran War and its costs and shift the conversation to something else. Dana Loesch went even further than the WSJ and claimed that Iran and Israel weren’t even a top four concern for voters, that instead it was the economy, cost of living, and tariffs. But that’s not what exit polling shows. Loesch in particular was widely mocked on X for her inability to correctly read exit polls that showed three out of four voters said the Iran war was a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress.
There’s also a dim-witted sleight-of-hand being employed here. Loesch and other neocons keep citing “cost of living” as a major reason for voter discontent with the GOP. But of course the number one cost of living indicator is gas prices (because people are reminded of gas price hikes every time they fill up). Ordinary people are not going to respond to a poll question about their major concerns by saying “the Strait of Hormuz is closed.” But the closure of the strait, a direct result of the war, is of course the cause of the cost of living increase that they do cite.
This entire debate is deeply dishonest. The war was never popular, was never sold to the American people, and nothing about it was ever going to be easy or clean. Neocons like Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen went out and argued that the regime in Tehran would collapse and that there would be no downsides to attacking Iran.
What happened was what anyone could have predicted: gas prices spiked, the regime didn’t fall, and the American public soured on the whole thing. Instead of acknowledging those realities, the neocons spent most of this last year arguing that we only need two more weeks of bombing Iran to win the war, like some sick parody of Anthony Fauci’s “two-weeks-to-stop-the-spread” during Covid.
Were there other factors that contributed to voter discontent with Trump and the GOP? Yes, of course. But the overwhelming factor, the thing that caused the president’s approval to crater going into these midterms, wasn’t tariffs or corruption or immigration enforcement. It was the war and the costs that the war imposed on the American people. They were especially angered by higher gas and grocery prices because no one in the Trump administration even tried to make a case for the war before they started dropping bombs on Iran. Moreover, they felt betrayed by a president who ran, in part, on a promise not to start new Mideast wars.
Not that communist Democrats have flipped a bunch of states blue and taken control of Congress, it would be nice if we could have an honest conversation about what went wrong. But the people most responsible for this catastrophe insist on gaslighting the American people and trying to blame things that are, at best, secondary factors.
As Vance said, if they think the war was worth an historic GOP midterm defeat, that it was worth losing control of the Senate for the next six years at least, then just come out and say that. Make a case for it. But they won’t — just like they never really made a serious case for going to war against Iran in the first place.
