Whether or not you’ve seen it, many Republicans have found their scapegoat for the party’s devastating midterm defeat last week: the Iran War.
From Vice President JD Vance to Megyn Kelly, Matt Walsh, Benny Johnson, The Federalist, and The Daily Caller, the convenient explanation has been that Republicans lost because they abandoned the isolationism these voices champion. Never mind that history has not been on the side of the party in power, that voters tend to punish an administration that has failed to deliver on the economy, or that none of them have offered data establishing the war as the decisive factor.
As data from the midterms continues to roll in, the picture increasingly points to Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation appears to be the right one. Americans were broadly unhappy with President Trump’s policies and his handling of issues ranging from the economy and tariffs to ICE raids and the cost of living.
First, Republicans have to contend with an uncomfortable fact. Trump’s approval rating began slipping shortly after his inauguration and continued to decline almost uninterrupted into November. Yes, individual policy decisions played a role, but the overall trend was continuously downward. There is little reason to assume that staying out of the war would have reversed that trajectory, especially given how far underwater his approval rating was by the time the midterms arrived.
There's nothing to support the idea that the Iran War made a unique impact on Trump's approval rating. It is not even a blip here. https://t.co/mmjZeZMrab
— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) November 9, 2026
Now for the kicker. Higher presidential disapproval ratings correlate with greater losses in midterm elections, and President Trump’s disapproval rating stood at a historic 63 percent.
Trump’s approval rating was at 42% in February—before the Iran war. It’s debatable how much the drop from 42% to 37% was due to gas prices increasing $1 a gallon, but given his downward trend it’s doubtful his rating would have stabilized 8 months ago. https://t.co/ZnscVgoAcR https://t.co/VyBO9AjrEL
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) November 10, 2026
For reference, Bush’s disapproval stood at 57 percent in 2006, when Republicans lost about 30 House seats. At 55 percent disapproval, Obama’s Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 and 13 in 2014. Trump’s 54 percent disapproval in 2016 accompanied a 41-seat Republican loss in 2018, while Biden’s 55 percent accompanied a loss of just nine seats in 2022. This year, Trump’s disapproval reached 63 percent, and Republicans have already lost more than 40 seats, with final counts still coming in.
In other words, last Tuesday is hardly a historical outlier.
The Iran War is little more than an overly convenient scapegoat. It lets MAGA escape the blame by pinning the defeat on old-style Republicans, neo-conservatives, while leaving the issues Americans said were front and center during the midterms untouched.
Those concerns include issues about corruption, the Qatari jet, Trump’s $2 billion increase in net worth, and special access to the White House through Trump phones or Trump’s $1 million Gold Card visa program. It includes the rollout of ICE raids and how publicly and overtly they were carried out. It includes tariffs, which an overwhelming majority of Americans said were bad for them and which added an average of $2,000 to household costs.
Most importantly, it leaves the governing philosophy of MAGA 2.0 free from any serious scrutiny.
This is not a criticism of MAGA as a whole, but of how otherwise good policies have been carried out in ways that make them deeply unpopular. Take immigration enforcement. Why make a spectacle of ICE raids? Why unabashedly defend unnecessary violence? If self-deportation can deliver better results, why not prioritize it?
Support for immigration enforcement is not a blank check for every tactic used in its name. Why prioritize spectacle and publicity when the policy and its results should speak for themselves?
That is the conversation the commentators I named above seem determined to avoid. It is much easier to blame the loss on neocons and move on than to look inward, defend core policy goals, and admit that those policies were not always carried out well.
Until that conversation happens, the situation is likely to get worse, especially as these same commentators call for doubling down on the poor rollout of good policies while leaving Iran to its own nuclear devices. That is a lose-lose situation, and one that will do our party no favors as we look ahead to 2028.