Poll finds 74% of voters say Iran conflict was a crucial or major factor

Majority-Hispanic counties moved more than 22 percentage points against Republican Senate candidates

A voter poll cited in BBC News’s analysis of the 2026 US midterms found that 74% of those asked said the conflict with Iran was a crucial or major factor in their vote for Congress. The outlet’s post-election account also set out county-level Senate results: a New York Times analysis found that majority-Hispanic counties moved more than 22 percentage points against Republican Senate candidates compared with the 2024 presidential election, and BBC News reported that counties with a Black majority also moved significantly toward Democratic candidates in Senate races. The Mississippi Senate race remained on a knife-edge, and Democrats took control of Congress in the midterms.

Data reporter Jeff Adelson said the change was greater than that recorded by any other major demographic group in the country. Democrats claimed all three House races in the overwhelmingly Hispanic congressional districts along the Texas-Mexico border, and BBC News reported that the movement toward Republicans among some Hispanic and Black voters that helped Trump secure a decisive win in 2024 appeared to reverse in these midterms. The shift came amid widespread anger at immigration enforcement, with Pew Research Center finding that 56% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of ICE.

BBC News reported that the Senate race in Mississippi was on a knife-edge. Mississippi has the largest share of Black voters of any US state, at around 37%. If Scott Colom can win, he would become the first Democrat elected to the Senate in Mississippi since 1982.

BBC News identified the war with Iran, which the United States and Israel launched in February, as a major factor in surging prices. Fuel prices then shot up after Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation, strangling a key artery for the passage of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. US voters have been paying the price at the pump ever since.

The war proved broadly unpopular with most Americans, BBC News said. Around six in 10 of those asked in a voter poll said the United States made the wrong decision to take military action against Iran. For MAGA Republicans, the war also felt like a broken promise in Trump’s America First campaign agenda, in which he pledged there would be no more wars. The morning after the election, Trump conceded the war had played a role in the Republican defeat but insisted in an interview on Fox that he had no choice but to intervene to stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

Across the United States, voters were grappling with the soaring cost of essentials, and BBC News reported that the anger was palpable on the ground in key races. “Gas prices, grocery prices, everything’s going up,” one North Carolina voter told the BBC ahead of the elections, adding that she had switched her vote from Republican to Democratic. Prices increased by 3.7% in the year to September, driven higher by fuel and energy prices, and average US retail diesel prices in early October were just shy of the record of $6.52 (£4.83) per gallon seen in September, according to government data. Almost eight in 10 voters, 79%, said inflation had caused them and their family a severe or moderate hardship in the past year, according to data from voter polls, and more than six in 10 respondents blamed Trump for the higher-than-usual prices, saying they thought the prices were because of the president’s policies.

BBC News said the scale and breadth of the Democratic wave was made possible by strong candidates who came across as authentic, especially in traditional Republican heartlands. Those candidates stuck to a disciplined message about the cost of living and healthcare access. Former teacher James Talarico and pastor Adam Hamilton talked about their faith in a way that struck a chord in Texas and Kansas respectively. In South Carolina, Democrat Annie Andrews pulled off a shock upset; the former pediatrician’s focus on health care affordability resonated in a country where many see the system as broken.

Former public health official Abdul El-Sayed triumphed in Michigan to keep that seat Democratic, making “money out of politics, money in your pocket” a key slogan. Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff won re-election in Georgia with the cost of living and corruption as central messages. BBC News said the 39-year-old’s comfortable victory in a state Trump won twice will fuel rumors of a 2028 presidential run.

Even Trump praised the Democrats, telling Fox News they “did a good job.” Conversely, BBC News reported that some Republican candidates, like Ken Paxton in Texas, were criticized for running poor campaigns that were not focused enough on voters’ concerns. Two of the issues voters were most unhappy with — rocketing prices and the Iran war — were directly linked to the president, and his approval ratings had fallen even among Republican voters, which made some of the states that backed him in 2024 especially vulnerable.

Trump urged voters to imagine him on the ballot to galvanize his supporters, but BBC News said that making himself the focus of the Republican campaign was risky and appears to have backfired. After more than a decade as the central figure in American politics, some observers see the results as evidence that the “glitz may be wearing off Trump’s brand.” In the months leading up to the vote, polling indicated that many Americans wanted Trump to focus more on their concerns about rocketing prices. In his final campaign speech on Monday in Washington DC, he talked at length about his controversial renovation project of the Reflecting Pool behind him.

Democrats swept to victory in the 2026 US midterm elections, taking control of Congress. BBC News said the scale of the Republican defeat was being viewed as a “resounding rejection” of Donald Trump’s two years in the White House, while noting that an incumbent president’s party generally tends to have a bad night in midterms. The outlet’s analysis identified five factors behind the losses: the soaring cost of essentials, the Iran war, the strength of Democratic candidates, Trump’s own campaign and the shift among Hispanic and Black voters.