ANALYSIS — Just a few months ago, Republican strategists expressed some optimism about their party’s midterm fortunes. Gas prices were falling, the stock market was surging and tax refunds were imminent.
But President Donald Trump’s war with Iran has at least stalled that momentum, and he’s at risk of being an anvil around the necks of GOP candidates in the fall midterms.
Historical midterm trends are working against the party that holds the House majority, particularly with an unpopular president in the White House. While Republicans had faith in the direction of the economy and felt they had time to turn things around before November, neither of those factors are working in their favor anymore.
Remember 2024
One of the most important dynamics of this year’s elections is the narrative about what happened in 2024. To Republicans, voters gave Trump and their party a mandate.
“He’s just doing what he said he was going to do” and “He’s just delivering on campaign promises” are common GOP refrains. In reality, 2024 was more of a repudiation of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the status quo rather than an embrace of Republicans and their agenda.
That’s part of what Trump and Republicans are struggling with now. The president is careening into spaces and places where voters express no interest in going.
For example, while Republicans are trying to retroactively make the case for the war in Iran, it was nowhere near the top of voters’ minds in 2024. Just 4 percent of voters said foreign policy was the most important issue to them, according to the 2024 exit polls conducted for CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. The issue ranked a distant fifth behind democracy (34 percent), the economy (32 percent), abortion (14 percent) and immigration (12 percent).
The case for the strikes against Iran is also complicated by the administration’s own rhetoric following Operation Midnight Hammer — the Trump administration’s name for the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites — almost a year ago.
“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump said last June. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a briefing at the Pentagon, following those attacks.
Even if the current war’s goal is to eliminate nonnuclear threats or punish Tehran for decades of bad behavior, it’s a striking response and escalation from last year when Iran was supposedly neutered.
Overall, it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t come back to the Oval Office with a strong vote of confidence. According to the same 2024 exit polls, he was elected despite an overall negative image rating: 46 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable. And the percentage of voters who felt concerned (14 percent) or scared (35 percent) if Trump were elected president matched those who said they were excited (22 percent) or optimistic (27 percent).
Trump was elected to restore order and fix the economy, not create more chaos. And even if the war is a noble cause, which is a big “if,” Republicans still risk being seen as taking their eyes off affordability and the cost of living.
How’s it going?
There’s technically still time for Trump’s political standing to improve, but he’s not even moving in the right direction, and the war might be to blame.
The president’s net job approval rating has dropped from minus 13 points at the end of February, when “Operation Epic Fury” began, to minus 17 points on Tuesday, according to Nate Silver’s national average.
By this point in his first term, Trump’s job rating had taken a modest turn for the better. He improved from a low of minus 20 points during his first year in office to minus 13 points in April 2018, according to G. Elliott Morris’ Strength in Numbers. That’s virtually the same negative 13-point job approval rating the president had that fall when Republicans lost 40 seats in the 2018 midterms. Now, Trump is at minus 20 with no signs of improvement yet.
At this stage, House Democrats are favored to win at least the three seats needed to win the majority in November. And if things don’t improve, Democrats could win the Senate as well. Democratic overperformances in Tuesday’s elections in Wisconsin and Georgia fit with a year-long trend that, if applied to the Senate battleground, could be enough for a Democratic majority in that chamber as well.
For now, Republicans are putting a lot of confidence in their institutional fundraising advantage, Democrats’ historic unpopularity and the trope that “special elections are special.” According to the GOP, Republican voters will magically turn out to vote at normal levels in November and independent voters will revert to something closer to 2024 because, they say, Democrats are too extreme.
Such a scenario is possible, but it would be a stunning reversal of more than a year of election results. Right now, Republicans in Congress are on pace to suffer heavy losses in November.
