Vance blames the war for Republican midterm losses
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would do nothing differently about his unpopular, eight-month-old war against Iran, as Democrats’ resounding midterm election victory — powered in part by voter dissatisfaction with the war — left open the question of whether he resumes the full-scale strikes he had threatened before the vote. Middle Eastern officials were on high alert for his next move, and Vice President JD Vance said the war was the reason Republicans lost.
In his first comments after the election, Trump largely agreed with Vance, who had publicly ruminated on the war being a catastrophe for Republicans. “It’s largely true because it drove gasoline up a little bit,” Trump said. Still, he doubled down on his decision to launch the conflict despite its big political cost. “At the same time, if I had to do it again, I’d do it again,” he said. “I can tell you that as far as that war is concerned I would have done nothing different,” the president said.
For weeks, Trump threatened to return to a full-scale bombardment of Iran once the U.S. elections were in the rearview mirror if Tehran did not come to a settlement under terms acceptable to him. The strikes and counterstrikes have caused tens of billions of dollars of damage in the region, and the conflict has reached households around the world with elevated gas prices and rising costs in just about every sector.
The military situation is more complicated than it was before the vote. Oil is flowing again from the Strait of Hormuz, with U.S. Navy escorts for international tankers, but the conflict has spread to the Red Sea, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels are fighting a Saudi Arabia-led coalition. The situation in the Red Sea remains particularly volatile. The Houthis are attacking Yemeni civilians and Saudi infrastructure and are looking to bolster ties with militant groups across the Horn of Africa. Their attacks on areas controlled by the internationally recognized Yemeni government have also worsened a growing humanitarian crisis.
A senior Yemeni government official said the threat the region faces from Iran and its proxy groups “did not change overnight” with the U.S. elections, and urged Washington to avoid hasty decisions. The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the basis of anonymity.
“There’s reason to suspect that Trump may feel less restrained given that the political damage is done,” said Brian Haggerty, a former senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency who focused on Middle East security issues and now works with Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank. “At the same time, the strategic calculus or the strategic logic of what you hope to achieve through an escalation of strikes against Iran is no different today than it was a week ago or a month ago.”
Haggerty said Trump could maintain something close to the current posture, with the U.S. military carrying out what it calls “defensive strikes” while the naval blockade restricts the flow of Iranian oil to the global market.
Another option, David Schenker said, is striking Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a facility linked to its nuclear program that is buried deep underground in central Iran. Trump has repeatedly suggested he was considering targeting the site. Schenker, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in Trump’s first term, said Trump could then walk away, contend he had done sufficient damage to Iran’s nuclear program and perhaps try to pursue what he called a “fig leaf agreement” — one that restores freedom of navigation to the Strait of Hormuz, offers Iran some degree of sanctions relief and punts additional nuclear talks to the future.
A more aggressive option would follow through on Trump’s earlier threats to launch massive attacks on Iranian infrastructure. “The Iranians may believe the president is wounded and constrained by Congress, but the opposite can also be true,” Schenker said. Such escalation would likely exacerbate the oil and energy price problem that many voters cited as a reason for supporting Democrats on Tuesday, Schenker said.
Oil markets pointed the other way. The price for a barrel of Brent crude tumbled below $95 on Wednesday after the election, touching its lowest level in two months, a signal that markets do not expect major strikes.
Middle Eastern officials had been hanging on Trump’s every word in the weeks before the elections, looking for clues on how he was weighing his next steps. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressed for renewed strikes on Iran during a call over the weekend with Trump, who would not commit to taking military action, according to a person briefed on the call.
Three Middle Eastern government officials said on Wednesday that Trump and his administration had seemed to be signaling to Iran that its leverage would only diminish after the U.S. elections were over. Separately, administration officials had privately suggested in diplomatic channels that Trump might be more willing to restart strikes after Nov. 3 because he would have little left to lose politically, according to the officials, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. After Tuesday’s electoral loss, there was lingering concern that Trump might be more emboldened to carry out full-scale or new limited strikes against Iran, the officials said. A fourth official said the results of the election gave mediators a measure of optimism about finding a pathway to resolving the conflict.
Vance appeared to pin the electoral outcome on the war more forcefully than Trump, who initially blamed the GOP’s candidates for the big loss. “The reason we lost,” Vance said of the midterm elections in a lengthy social media post, “is the war.” Vance, a potential 2028 presidential contender, had been among the most skeptical inside the White House on the wisdom of launching the war but got on board with Trump’s decision once he made it.
Several Democratic candidates who scored upsets on Tuesday noted voter discontent with the Iran war in their victory speeches. “Wherever I went, I heard the same thing,” said Sen.-elect Josh Turek of Iowa. “They would say, Josh, I’m struggling just to keep food on the table, keep a roof above my head, pay my electric bill. And with this war in Iran, I’m struggling just to keep gas in my tank.”
The AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters in the United States, found that about 6 in 10 voters said the country made the “wrong decision” in taking military action against Iran. Most of those voters backed the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race, but the survey suggested the Iran war was not the top issue for most voters. Only about one-third of voters said the war in Iran was “crucial” to shaping how they voted for Congress, well below the roughly half who said the same of the cost of living or government corruption.
Nearly all voters who backed the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race said going to war with Iran was the “wrong decision,” while roughly 8 in 10 voters who backed the Republican candidate said it was the “right decision.” About 6 in 10 voters nationally said they were “very concerned” about the cost of gasoline and diesel, the poll showed, and about two-thirds of that group voted for the Democratic candidate in their local U.S. House race.