Unless you’ve been living under a rock (no shame Patrick Star!), you’ve likely heard about last Tuesday’s “Blue Wave” midterm elections. The Democrats’ strong performance at the polls flipped control of the House and the Senate, delivering stunning results on the way, including flipping long-time red states like Kansas and Texas.
As the GOP scrambles to repair the damage and Democrats strategize about how to use their new power in a divided Washington, one takeaway seems obvious: this was a foreign policy election, in which the Iran war and the costs it brought home served as the tipping point.
But can we read these election results as a repudiation of U.S. foreign policy writ-large, or is this a specific response to one of the dumbest interventions in the long history of American adventurism? What does JD Vance's day-after effort to distance himself from the war tell us about how Republicans are digesting this result? And if Tuesday was a rebuke of U.S. foreign policy as usual, are Democrats ready to respond accordingly?
These are the questions we posed to Responsible Statecraft’s own editor-in-chief Kelley Vlahos and managing editor Connor Echols for the latest Always at War: Election Edition.
As Americans lined up, Bic pen in hand, ready to fill in their respective bubbles, a lion’s share had Iran on their mind. Exit polls show that the Iran war was a “crucial” or “major” factor in how 74% of Americans cast their vote on Tuesday. And, as we point out in the episode, many battleground candidates weren’t afraid to connect the cost-of-living crisis affecting too many Americans to the reckless spending on a war the Trump administration promised to end in a few weeks. In Kansas, Senator-elect Adam Hamilton told CBS that Democrats need to end the war in Iran, address tariffs, and lower healthcare costs.
As Echols put it, “I feel very comfortable calling this a foreign policy election. I do think that this was the defining issue.” But he’s reluctant to claim that Americans are suddenly totally bought into a different U.S. foreign policy, pointing out that, if the kidnapping of Maduro had been Trump’s only aggressive intervention, he’s not sure it would have triggered such a widespread rebuke. One can’t help but wonder: if the war had not closed the Strait of Hormuz and disrupted oil trade, would Tuesday have looked totally different?
Iran was hardly the only foreign policy issue on the ballot, either. The American people elected more than a dozen new House Democrats to Congress who support an arms embargo on Israel and call Gaza a genocide, plus two senators: Troy Jackson in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. And while Israel policy may not have been at the top of every voter’s mind, it still ranked as a top-10 issue for Americans heading into the elections, another indication of just how dramatically the politics around Israel have changed in a few short years.
In fact, AIPAC was among the biggest losers Tuesday. As Quincy’s Eli Clifton reports, of the $84 MILLION AIPAC’s network spent in races decided so far, a whopping $55 million, or two thirds, went to candidates that lost. It turns out that American voters don’t want to be bought.
Interestingly, it’s pretty clear Trump’s team knew their reckless wars could wreck their midterm prospects. Trump tacitly acknowledged voters' anger when he came out on election day to assure voters we were going to end aid to Israel (spoiler alert: that’s not exactly true). But in a long-form X post written in the wake up the blue-nami, JD Vance came out hat in hand, acknowledging the American people’s frustrations with the Iran war, the economy, and our ongoing support for Israel. There are dissertations that could be written about Vance’s tweet, but the takeaway for our purposes is simple: even though the administration knew this war was a political disaster, it still failed to do what was necessary to end it.
As Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others begin to mull running for President in 2028, it’s abundantly clear that many of the shibboleths around America’s bipartisan foreign policy consensus have been discredited. Questions about our approach to the world — like why we went to war with Iran, or if Washington cares more about the needs of arms industry CEOs and foreign leaders than Americans — will dominate the coming elections.
Dissatisfaction with America’s disastrous foreign policy is thoroughly mainstream.