Republicans just got steamrolled in the midterms.
The pundits who insisted one issue would never drive the results are now scrambling for an alibi.
And Donald Trump just gave one answer that left Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin with nowhere to hide
As West Wing Daily reports:
The President Said Out Loud What the Hawks Won’t
Democrats swept the House and the Senate on election night, winning seats in places Trump carried comfortably two years ago.
President Trump phoned into Fox News as the returns came in, and he didn’t pretend the fight with Iran had nothing to do with it.
“Iran was a piece of it,” Trump said.
He also didn’t back away from the decision. “I think a part of it was Iran, but at the same time, people understood the importance of what I’ve done with Iran,” the President told the network.
Trump told Fox he believed Americans supported the goal of the mission but weren’t willing to put up with the “short-term” pain at the gas pump that came with it. He even congratulated the other side, saying Democrats had “been looking for this one for 11 years, and they finally got it.”
That is a rare thing in Washington, DC. A sitting President looked at a bad night, named a cause, and refused to hide behind turnout charts.
Vice President JD Vance picked up the thread the next morning and pointed straight back to his boss. “The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote on X.
The numbers back them both up. Only 26 percent of voters told NBC exit pollsters that the war was a minor factor or no factor in their vote. Sixty-three percent called the military action the wrong decision, and 82 percent of that group voted for Democrats.
Echelon Insights found the same pattern among Trump’s own 2024 voters who now disapprove of him. Fifteen percent of them pointed to wars and Iran as the reason. Only 3 percent blamed tariffs.
The Podcast Forecast That Aged Like Milk in the Sun
In September, Levin welcomed Shapiro onto his podcast, and the two men compared notes on the political cost of the war.
Levin cited a Fox survey and told Shapiro that “Iran is a 4 percent issue with the American people.”
“So whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another,” Levin said. “What’s your take on this?”
“I think that’s exactly right,” Shapiro answered.
It wasn’t exactly right. It wasn’t even in the neighborhood.
But Levin isn’t taking questions on the forecast. After the returns came in, he went to X and complained that “every issue anyone can imagine is being used as the basis for the midterm loss, apart from historical trends.”
Historical trends make a cozy blanket for a man who promised the war would cost nothing. Trump didn’t reach for that blanket. Levin did.
A little history on both pundits helps here. Levin once vowed he would “never” support Trump during the 2016 race, and Trump’s own team accused him of being in the tank for Ron DeSantis when he promoted the Florida Governor’s 2023 campaign launch. Shapiro spent 2016 as one of the loudest Never-Trump voices on the Right and talked up DeSantis heading into the 2024 primary.
Both men also spent their careers demanding a harder line on Iran, including during the years they were taking shots at Trump.
Readers can sort out what that combination means.
The Federalist Founder Who Called It Before the Polls Closed
Sean Davis, the co-founder and CEO of The Federalist, didn’t wait for the final tallies.
“This will be the biggest national wipeout for Republicans since 2006, when voters brutally punished the GOP for an ill-advised and poorly planned war in the Middle East,” Davis wrote.
Then he pinned the blame where he believes it belongs. “We had a generational opportunity and a massive coalition in 2024, and neocons ****** it all away for yet another pointless Middle East war,” Davis posted.
And he singled out Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who wrote in January that there was “no downside to striking the regime.”
“Marc Thiessen is the Anthony Fauci of 2026,” Davis wrote, arguing that Thiessen “destroyed his approval ratings with neocon forever war nonsense, and left him with a smoking crater where Republicans used to be standing.”
Davis’ message boils down to a simple one: these people sold the product, the product failed, and nobody should take their next sales pitch seriously.
Ted Cruz Wants to Run on the Same Plan Voters Just Rejected
Then there’s US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
In March, Cruz assured Americans the war would be old news by the time voters went to the polls. “If it extends that long, we’ve done something wildly wrong,” he said.
It extended that long.
By June, Cruz was on CNBC insisting he had “seen no data” pointing to a big midterm impact, and lecturing that “I don’t think national security decisions should be done based on short-term political considerations.”
But Cruz didn’t stop at defending the war. He wants a bigger one. On the School of War podcast, Cruz said “Our objective should be regime collapse,” pushed for arming Iranians to topple their own government, and said he doesn’t “particularly care who comes next.”
Anybody who lived through Iraq has heard that tune before.
Cruz also blasted President Trump’s peace framework with Tehran, the same negotiations Vance has helped lead. And according to people familiar with his comments, Cruz has told donors that Vance’s views are “dangerously isolationist.”
Vance has already read the tea leaves. “He’s clearly running for president,” the Vice President told Megyn Kelly in June.
So the picture of 2028 comes into focus. Cruz, the leading Never-Trump candidate of 2016, has broken with Trump on tariffs, sniffed at the proposed $5,000 rebate checks, fought the Iran talks, and keeps aiming quiet jabs at Vance’s America First foreign policy. Regime collapse looks like the calling card he wants to carry into a primary against Vance, the movement’s heir apparent, and it’s the one the donor class pining for the pre-Trump party would happily bankroll.
Whether that sells in a primary is up to Republican voters. But Cruz would be pitching a regime change war to the same electorate that just spent an entire election telling pollsters what it thinks of the current one.
Somebody Paid the Bill in 2006
Go back to March 2003. Vice President Dick Cheney told Meet the Press, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
Voters delivered their verdict on that promise in November 2006 and handed Democrats both chambers. The day after the election, President George W. Bush announced that Donald Rumsfeld was out as Secretary of Defense.
At least somebody cleaned out a desk that time.
The cable hawks of 2026 don’t have desks to clean out. They have podcasts, columns, and Fox News bookings, and every one of them will be back on the air explaining the next war before the new Congress gets sworn in.
To be precise about the data, the AP’s voter survey found that the cost of living topped the war as the issue most voters called crucial. But fuel prices run straight through Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, so the grocery bill and the war bill land in the same envelope.
And the voters who walked away from Republicans didn’t hand the gavels to anyone who will lower that bill. They handed them to the Democratic Party, whose energy is coming from the socialist Left, from the Democratic Socialist who just won the race for mayor of Washington, DC, to the progressive bloc already drawing up subpoenas.
That’s the real price of listening to the war caucus. A neocon blunder opened the door, and socialism is walking through it.
Trump at least owned his share of the night. The pundits who promised a free war still haven’t owned theirs.
In March, Ted Cruz said that if the Iran war was still front and center by November, “we’ve done something wildly wrong.” When voters went to the polls, 74 percent told NBC exit pollsters the war was a crucial or major factor in their vote.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Trump Congratulates Democrats, Notes Iran War Played a Role”; Fox News, “Conservatives stunned by ‘catastrophic’ midterm blue tsunami”; The Federalist, “Vance: The Iran War Cost Us The Midterms” and “Republicans Learned Nothing From 2006 About Midterms And Foreign Wars”; The New American, “Vance, America First Conservatives: The War Cost Us the Election. Neocons in Denial”; Sean Davis (@seanmdav) on X; Mark Levin (@marklevinshow) on X; CBS News, “Vance blames Iran conflict for GOP midterm defeats” and “Sen. Ted Cruz calls for Trump to arm Iran’s protesters”; PBS NewsHour/AP, “Vance blames Iran war for GOP midterm losses”; The Hill, “Cruz on high gas prices”; ZeroHedge, “Ted Cruz Got Something Right On The Iran War”; The National Desk, “JD Vance says Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is ‘clearly’ running for president”; Yahoo News/Washington Post reporting on Cruz’s 2028 deliberations; The Independent via Yahoo News on Levin and the DeSantis launch; Echelon Insights polling.
