Vice President JD Vance made the surprising admission on social media that Trump administration’s war with Iran was what caused the massive Democratic Party sweep of the midterm elections, stating plainly that “The reason we lost is the war.”
Saying “the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone,” Vance noted that a poll found Trump 2024 voters who ditched the president’s party in 2026 gave four main answers to the question of what the Republicans could do to win them back: “1) End the war, 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation, 3) Put America First , 4) Change our relationship to Israel.”
All four of these answers tie directly in to Trump’s decision to launch an unprovoked war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The war itself, failing to put America first, and Washington’s grotesque alliance with the state of Israel are all straightforward references to Trump’s warmongering in the middle east. Cost of living/inflation is also strongly related since the blockades resulting from Trump’s war have been costing every American household thousands of dollars in rising fuel and grocery prices.
That last one is the real story of this election. As is often the case, economic concerns ranked as the number one concern among US voters in the lead-up to the midterm elections, and one of the major reasons why Americans have been struggling economically is because of the war in Iran.
So the story isn’t that Americans spontaneously transformed into a country full of tender-hearted peaceniks in November 2026. The story is that Iran was able to impose an economic cost on ordinary Americans for the actions of their evil government.
The average American is a propaganda-addled empire zombie who has been indoctrinated into cold-hearted indifference to their government’s abuses in the global south. American voters didn’t reject the war in Iran because they believe it’s immoral to bomb schools and civilian infrastructure in depraved wars of aggression overseas, they rejected it because it was costing them more to fill up their pickup trucks and they were having to pay more money for their buckets of Mountain Dew and ranch dressing.
If Trump had won the war in four to six weeks as he initially claimed he would, his monstrous attack on Iran would have been no more consequential in the voting booths than his regime change interventionism in Venezuela. It is only because Iran succeeded in doing whatever it needed to do to retain the military strength needed to impose a financial toll on the American electorate that the Republicans lost the Senate for years to come. War with Iran is now officially political poison because of Iranian strength.
US officials love to whine and complain that Iran spends its money on its military instead of on the Iranian people (though the United States is literally the absolute dead-last country on earth who has any business airing such a grievance), and to this day they’re still weeping crocodile tears about the way Tehran aggressively smacked down the CIA/Mossad uprising at the beginning of the year. But Iran has shown the world that a nation must retain its strength if it wants to retain its sovereignty and avoid being turned into another resource extraction scam for the US empire.
Every country that retains the necessary muscle to beat back the US empire’s efforts to absorb it into its power umbrella invariably gets smeared by the imperial propaganda machine as a tyrannical and despotic rogue state, but it is the US empire who makes it necessary for governments to exert force if they don’t want to be replaced with subservient US puppet regimes. Western propaganda likes to frame the global struggle as free democracies versus oppressive autocracies, but really it’s just nations who wish to retain their sovereignty versus the empire who wants to take that sovereignty away from them. It is the fault of the US empire that the only nations who have thus far resisted absorption are the ones who retain enough military strength and domestic control to do so.
The United States didn’t retreat from Vietnam because the Americans suddenly developed a conscience, it retreated because the Vietnamese fought like lions and kept sending home coffins draped in red, white and blue. The Republicans didn’t lose the midterms because Americans dislike war, they lost because the Iranians beat the shit out of them.
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The US could end the war. They could always surrender.
What Vance didn't include in his post on why the Republican's lost:
5) The Epstein files