U.S. Midterm Earthquake: Trump’s War on Iran Triggers Republican Rout
WASHINGTON — Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections, a rout that Republicans themselves described as a “total, complete rejection” of President Donald Trump and a direct verdict on his war with Iran.
The defeat was not merely a setback. It was a demolition. Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats, including in Kansas—where no Democrat had won a Senate race since 1932—and Texas, where James Talarico became the first Democrat elected to the Senate since 1988.
In the House, Democrats flipped more than two dozen districts, some of which
Trump had carried by double digits in 2024. By Wednesday morning, the scale of the loss had shattered any Republican attempt at spin.
“This is a disaster of the first magnitude,” Bill Miller, a top Republican lobbyist in Texas, told the BBC. “It’s on him. It’s not on anybody else. It’s a total, complete rejection of President Trump. Nobody saw it coming like this.”
A senior Senate Republican official was even more blunt. “We are beyond candidate quality. It’s a bloodbath,” the official told Politico. “Trump did this.”
The terrorist war on Iran sat at the center of the wreckage. Trump himself conceded as much. “I think a part of it was Iran,” he told Fox News, adding that voters supported his actions but “weren’t willing to do the short term consequences of paying more for gasoline.”
A White House ally described the combination of the war, tariffs, and the immigration crackdown as a “perfect storm” that created “palpable frustration” within the party, with anger at Trump “extremely high.”
The numbers were brutal. An exit poll by Responsible Statecraft found that 74 percent of voters said the war was a “crucial” or “major” factor in their vote, and 62 percent believed using military force against Iran was the “wrong decision.” Trump’s disapproval rating stood at 60 percent on Election Day, with approval at 37 percent—the lowest for any president before a midterm since Harry Truman in 1946.
Senator Peter Welch of Vermont did not mince words. “The president has forced us into an illegal war in the Middle East,” he said in a statement, calling the result “a clear repudiation of Donald Trump’s reckless agenda and his failure to deliver for the American people.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become the first Black speaker in history, declared simply: “America is back.”
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, speaking after the results, said the outcome demonstrated the urgency of ending the war on Iran, which has driven fuel prices higher. “The world has an opportunity now to unite around the issue that is affecting us all, and that’s the cost of living,” he said.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez framed the result in broader terms, writing on X that American voters had rejected “policies that only make people poorer,” as well as hatred, machismo, climate denial, and elite privilege. “We saw this in Brazil,” he wrote. “Now it has happened in the United States. And soon it will happen in Spain.”
Trump, for his part, refused to accept personal responsibility. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he posted on Truth Social. He later shared an image of a red cap emblazoned with the word “VETO,” signaling confrontation rather than conciliation.
But the Republican Party’s own operatives had already rendered their judgment. “It was just one mistake after another,” said Gregg Peppin, a Republican strategist in Minnesota. “Clearly, in state after state, people did not like the president’s policies.”
The war on Iran, launched on Feb. 28 with U.S.-Israeli strikes, has cost American taxpayers at least $47.1 billion, according to Pentagon estimates. It has martyred thousands of Iranian civilians, including more than 165 people in a strike on a girls’ school in Hormozgan province. And on Tuesday, the American people delivered their answer.
As voters delivered their verdict, Trump spent Election Day floating an extraordinary escape hatch. In a phone interview with Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” the president claimed he enjoys a 99 percent approval rating in Israeli occupied territories and mused about abandoning Washington altogether.
“If people ever get tired of me in the U.S., I’ll move to Israel and become prime minister,” Trump said. He provided no polling evidence for the 99 percent figure, which he has cited repeatedly since at least May.
Senator Chris Murphy, a senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the election was “a verdict on a war that made America weaker and Iran stronger.” He added: “The American people have now done what our generals could not — they have ended a war of choice that served no American interest.”
Representative Ro Khanna went further, calling the result “a defeat for the war party and a victory for diplomacy.” He said: “The message from the ballot box is unmistakable: the American people reject the illegal war on Iran, and they reject the politicians who sold it to them. Tonight, Iran won and the architects of this war lost.”
Former U.S. negotiator and sanctions official Richard Nephew wrote on X that the outcome represented “a comprehensive defeat of the maximum-pressure paradigm” and that “Iran emerges from this election with its position strengthened and its adversaries politically broken.” He said the vote “confirms what Tehran has argued all along — that the war was a strategic blunder that isolated Washington, not Iran.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, said the results were “a decisive American repudiation of the war on Iran” and that “the war’s architects have been defeated at the ballot box, not on the battlefield — and that is a victory for Iran by any measure.” He added that the vote signaled the collapse of the coalition that had pushed for confrontation with Tehran.