Most right-wing politicos expected a loss on Election Night. Some even expected a drubbing, but I don’t know very many of us who expected Republicans to lose seven Senate seats, with two more likely to go to the Democrats—including one in Mississippi.
That kind of generational loss in politics demands some soul-searching. Vice President JD Vance jumped on X to take ownership of the defeat, but also to put it in context: “The reason we lost is the war.” There’s a great deal of truth to that. National exit polling from NBC News found that 74% of voters said the war with Iran was a “crucial or major” factor in their vote in congressional races. Democrats won this cohort 63% to 35%.
Not only was the war unpopular on its merits, but it had deleterious downstream effects that repelled voters from the Republican Party. In normal times, American citizens need not concern themselves with the geography of foreign nations halfway across the world. But by Election Day, every agricultural worker in the Carolinas and every trucker in Iowa had become quite familiar with the Strait of Hormuz. They rightfully suspected that what was happening there might have something to do with gas sitting at $4.15 a gallon nationally—double what it had been a year before—and diesel prices reaching an all-time high in September.
But even this explains only part of what turned a typical midterm pushback into the worst political crisis for the GOP since Watergate. Many observers have tracked the leftward swing of young men and Hispanics, who only two years earlier had ushered in the red wave of 2024. The canary in the coal mine for Republicans was the extreme backlash from their most previously reliable supporters: married voters and parents.
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