Silver Yes the actual Iran-level debacle - depends. It would depend on someone to focus on it and do it in a way that is politically effective and doesn’t backfire on them with the public just not believing it or something. If it does come up it might be more an after the mid-terms thing if the Dems get the House and start impeachment proceedings and start asking questions about Trump’s conduct of the war.
Cautiously no effect before the mid-terms.
As an example - I thought the enquiry into the UK’s response to COVID would highlight the way that they didn’t do test trace isolate until far too late and could potentially have prevented the entire lockdown by scaling up testing rapidly and only done test trace isolate where the COVID was but that didn’t even seem to come up.
So the rally around the flag effect and “blame the Iranians for everything” type effect and what counts as politically acceptable messaging is hard to estimate.
But it is recent enough so that the Dems would certainly point to the high prices during the war. Also things like Trump’s promise not to start any wars, the length of the war, the number of Americans killed, the effects on the Gulf states, effects on the US stockpiles, the expense of the war when the US needs the money for many other things and so on.
So I expect political campaigning to be more on those lines and the rally around the flag plus blame the Iranians type effect to make it unlikely they say much about starting the war.
Then - on JCPOA they may well claim falsely that it’s the same as the JCPOA even if it isn’t. And people may believe them or not. I think that mightn’t be the best tactic but it’s hard to predict, Obama is of course already trying to say that but I don’t think he’s having that much of a effect and they’d go with what works with the voters.
So, politics isn’t necessarily based on things you can fact check, it depends on perception a lot. So hard ot predict but there will be lots of things the Dems can run on and the Republicans too of course.
Generally foreign policy has less effect on elections than you’d think. If you look at the Trump approval ratings for Economic Times it has a long list of things that the public care about.
Inflation / economy, Jobs & economy, Foreign Policy, Immigration and Crime.
Trump has net disapproval for all of them.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
The mid terms also depend a lot on local politics for the states and the districts. It’s less about foreign policy anyway than the presidential elections.
So - probably both ways the Iran war will have less effect than you’d think. Mainly that it’s stopped the treasury from reducing the base rate, kept prices higher than they would be and meant higher gasoline prices over the summer.
Also there could be some fallout from Jewish voters in the US because Netanyahu and Trump didn’t achieve the aims of either of them of regime change. Jews in the US tend to vote Democrat. Netanyahu’s decisions have had negative effects on his popularity in Israel and it may be a similar effect on Jewish popularity of Trump.
https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/jei-s-spring-2026-poll-press-release
And then for Iranians in the US another large demography - then the Iran war hasn’t helped them at all. Apart from the ones that support the regime but most do not. So they may vote Dem because of that too. Especially because of the way Trump promised regime change to them but they ended up with a regime that at least for now is if anything a little more hardline.
In actuality the deal itself shows the moderates won there. It’s not the shift further to the far right that some worried about. But it’s certainly not the regime change Trump promised.
So there will be various effects like that.
An immediate boost for Trump for ending the war. More boost for a stronger than JCPOA deal assuming he gets it. But other probably greater effects the other way for the economic impact and the effects on Jewish and Iranian voters and his promise not to start any more wars. And because mid terms focus more on local issues the foreign policy effects likely less than you might think.
And then many issues that could come up depending on the campaigns including scrutiny of the cost of the war.
Trump is now going to have to ask for a large bill to pay to replenish the stocks used in the war and that’s going to be a political football. The amount of money he will have to ask for to pay for the war.
That’s $200 billion and he couldn’t get it passed during the war itself. It will be a big focus in Congress in the near future.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y73gwk1qdo
I can’t see anything since then on how they plan to find the money. It will be opposed by both Dems and by fiscally conservative Republicans. Yet both will agree that the US has to replenish its stocks.
I wonder if they will try to leave funding it to after the election date in November??
Anyway that’s another potential political campaign issue.
